Generational Conflict and University Reform History of Science and Medicine Library

VOLUME 31 Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions

Editor M. Feingold California Institute of Technology

VOLUME 8

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/hsml Generational Conflict and University Reform

Oxford in the Age of Revolution

By Heather Ellis

Leiden • boston 2012 Cover illustration: “Oxford Commemoration—The Theatre from the Undergraduates Gallery.” Saturday June 25, 1870, The Graphic, p. 700.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ellis, Heather. Generational conflict and university reform : Oxford in the age of revolution / by Heather Ellis. p. cm. — (History of science and medicine library ; v. 31) (Scientific and learned cultures and their institutions ; v. 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-22552-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. University of Oxford—History. 2. Education, Higher—England—Oxford—History—19th century. 3. Educational change—England—History—19th century. I. Title.

LF518.E55 2012 378.425’74—dc23

2012019687

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. For my Mother

Contents

Acknowledgements ...... ix

Introduction: Generational Conflict and University Reform ...... 1

1. Riot, Revolution and ‘Reform’ in the Colleges, 1714–1789 ...... 21 The ‘New Independent Student’ and Meritocratic Reform at Cambridge ...... 23 Riots at Oxford and the Threat of a Royal Visitation, 1714–1748 ...... 32 Reaction at Oxford and ‘Reform’ of the Syllabus ...... 39 Religious Dissent and the Impact of the American Revolution ...... 48

2. ‘Adapted to the Present Times’? The New Examination Statute of 1800 ...... 64 The Impact of the French Revolution ...... 66 The New Examination System: The Statutes of 1800, 1807 and 1808 ...... 75 The Reception of the New System ...... 81 The Spectre of Junior Rebellion ...... 88 The University’s Response to its Critics ...... 92

3. The Emergence of a Junior Reform Programme, 1807–1823 ...... 104 Growing Undergraduate Resentment, 1807–1816 ...... 106 The Beginnings of Junior Participation in the Reform Debate, 1817–1818 ...... 115 After the ‘Oxford Spy’: Student Journalism and Generational Revolt ...... 124

4. noetics, Tractarians and the Peak of Junior Influence, 1824–1836 ...... 139 The Statute of 1824: The Beginnings of a Conservative Consensus ...... 141 The Emergence of a Noetic Reform Programme, 1825–1829 ...... 150 Back to School: The Failure of Noetic Reform and the Rise of Tractarianism ...... 166 viii contents

5. defensive Modernization: The Tractarian Threat and the Royal Commission of 1850 ...... 187 ‘A Dangerous and Successful Conspiracy’ ...... 189 Reform within Oxford ...... 202 The Royal Commission of 1850 ...... 208 Reactions to the Commissioners’ Report ...... 217

Conclusion ...... 229

Bibliography ...... 235 Index ...... 251 Acknowledgements

For all the kindness they have shown in the course of the research for this book I would like to thank Penelope Bulloch, Alan Tadiello and all the staff at Balliol College library as well as Hubert Stadler and Philippa Hicken at the Modern History Graduate Office, Oxford. I am also grateful to the staff of the Bodleian Library, the British Library and many of the college libraries in Oxford for generously assisting me in the course of my research. I would especially like to thank Oxford University History Faculty and Balliol College, whose generous graduate scholarships ensured that I was able to complete the research for the DPhil. In particular, I would like to thank my doctoral supervisors, Jane Garnett, and Stephen Harrison, whose insight, advice and support over the last few years have been invaluable. I also have to thank my colleagues at the Centre for British Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, for their patience and support in the final stages of writing up and in preparing the manuscript for publication. For their interest in the project and help in developing my ideas over a number of years, I would particularly like to thank Laurence Brockliss, Michele Cohen, Sean Brady, Paul Deslandes, Stefano Evangelista, Henry French, Glen O’Hara, Joanna Innes, Mary Clare Martin, Jessica Meyer, William van Reyk, Graciela Iglesias Rogers, Mark Rothery, Simon Skinner, Christopher Stray, Andy Wells and Sara Wolfson. I am also grateful to the team at Brill, who have been ready with help and advice throughout the various stages of preparing the manuscript for publication. Special thanks go to Marti Huetink (History Editor), Claire Tutty and Rosanna Woensdregt (Assistant Editors in History). In particular, I would like to thank the editor of the series, ‘Scientific and Learned Cultures and their Institutions’, Mordechai Feingold, for his help and advice. My greatest debt of gratitude, though, I owe to my parents, Hilary and David Ellis, and to my husband, Alex Clarkson, without whose love and support over so many years this book would never have been written. I must also say a very special thank you to my son, Leo Clarkson, who joined our family while the manuscript was still being prepared and has given me the love and strength I needed to see the project through to completion. The book is dedicated to my wonderful mother who sadly passed away before its completion. You were, and remain, my inspiration.

Introduction

GENERATIONAL CONFLICT AND UNIVERSITY REFORM

There have been many works dealing with the question of university reform at Oxford. It may be asked why another one is necessary. Most existing studies have, however, explained the course of reform primarily in relation to local institutional factors or the actions of particular individuals.1 When there have been attempts to locate reform of Oxford’s curriculum, examination system and institutional structures in the wider context of social and political developments in Britain, they have usually been presented in terms of the government being forced to step in to remedy an old-fashioned, conservative institution which had failed to reform itself.2 Any changes which took place before the Royal Commission of 1850 have been treated as comparatively superficial and as having left the most important institutional and ideological issues such as religious tests and close fellowships unaddressed. Those reforms which were introduced by Oxford’s governing body, the Hebdomadal Board, have been seen as half-hearted responses to pressure exerted from outside by Benthamite, Whig and non-conformist critics or, from the mid 1840s onwards, by a relatively small number of internal reformers such as Benjamin Jowett and Henry Halford Vaughan.3

1 For reform in eighteenth-century Oxford, see V.H.H. Green, “Reformers and Reform in the University” in L.S. Sutherland and L.G. Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Volume V The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986), pp. 607–38; for the first half of the nineteenth century, see M.G. Brock and M.C. Curthoys (eds.). The History of the University of Oxford Volume VI Nineteenth-Century Oxford Part 1 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 7–338; H.C.G. Matthew, “Noetics, Tractarians, and the Reform of the University of Oxford in the Nineteenth Century”, History of Universities 9 (1990), 195–225; P.B. Nockles, “An Academic Counter-Revolution: Newman and Tractarian Oxford’s Idea of a University”, History of Universities 10 (1991), 137–97. For university reform in Oxford in the nineteenth century as a whole, see W.R. Ward, Victorian Oxford (London, 1965); J. Engel, From Clergyman to Don. The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford (Oxford, 1983); H.S. Jones, Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don (Cambridge, 2007). 2 For this view, see E.G.W. Bill, University Reform in Nineteenth-Century Oxford: A Study of Henry Halford Vaughan, 1811–1885 (Oxford, 1973). 3 For this view see, for example, L.W.B. Brockliss, “The European University in the Age of Revolution” in Brock and Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. VI, p. 126. 2 introduction

Even the changes brought about by parliamentary intervention in the Oxford University Act of 1854, including the introduction of a broad, modern syllabus and the abolition of religious tests, have rarely been prob- lematized by historians. Such changes have usually been interpreted as forming part of the general climate of reform in the 1850s and 1860s; nor have such changes been seen as constituting a particularly urgent priority, being implemented only after the more pressing work of parliamentary and social reform.4 By contrast, historians have shown considerable interest in analyzing the motivations behind government support for parliamentary and franchise reform, factory and sanitary reform. Although a genuine desire for better social conditions among MPs from a variety of political backgrounds was undoubtedly an important motivating factor,5 historians have acknowledged that such reforms might also have been designed to act “as prophylactic, as alternative to revolution.”6 In A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?, Boyd Hilton put forward the idea that many of the key government interventions in the 1830s and 1840s were, to a large extent, driven by an elite fear of popular uprising. He argued that the British elite lived in constant fear of a French-style revolution, which forced them to engage with social problems to an unprecedented extent and to develop a much more socially interventionist state in the years before mid-century.7 This idea of reform as an antidote, a preventative to revolution has a long pedigree in the writing of British history. It forms an important part of still popular whiggish narratives which argue that it was only the readiness of the British elite to adapt to new political pressures and to open itself up to new groups which allowed Britain to avoid the kind of social and political revolution which plagued continental Europe in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century.8 The British elite, so the argument goes, were not a closed caste, defined by blood, but were rather constituted by a particular ideology and education, which anyone,

4 For this view of the 1850s, see R.A. Burns and J. Innes (eds.), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 57–60. 5 See, for example, Burns and Innes (eds.), Rethinking the Age of Reform, pp. 25–6; A. Sykes, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism, 1776–1988 (London, 1997), p. 22; D. McLean, Public Health and Politics in the Age of Reform: Cholera, the State and the Royal Navy in Victorian Britain (London, 2006), pp. 1–33. 6 Burns and Innes (eds.), Rethinking the Age of Reform, p. 33. 7 B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?: England 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006). 8 On the surprising longevity of aspects of the Whig Interpretation of History, see R.A. Cosgrove, “Reflections on the Whig Interpretation of History”, Journal of Early Modern His- tory 4:2 (2000), 147–67. generational conflict and university reform 3 in theory, could gain if they underwent the correct process of socialization. Oxford and Cambridge stood at the very centre of this process. Despite the fact that historians have done much in recent years to demonstrate just how serious and widespread the threat of social and political revolution was in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there has been little sign that the basic idea of the coherence and adaptability of the British elite has been challenged.9 Where a threat has been perceived, it has been seen to come from the lower classes. The years immediately following the French Revolution, the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the era of Chartism, from the late 1830s to the late 1840s, were times of real concern.10 As a result, it has only been those reforms which have been seen to benefit the lower classes and to respond to their demands for change that have been interpreted as part of a government policy designed to avoid revolution at home. The reform of elite institutions, such as the ancient universities, public schools and the civil service, which came only in the 1850s and early 1860s, is frequently left out of such narratives, on the assumption that such reforms formed part of a less anxious programme of reform which had been postponed to more settled times.11 Changes wrought by government interference at Oxford and Cambridge are usually described as aiming at

9 For the view that social upheaval in the wake of the French Revolution had only a limited impact on British politics see, for example, Colley, Britons, p. 206; on the adaptability of the British elite in general, see. P.J. Jupp, “The Landed Elite and Political Author- ity in Britain, ca. 1760–1850”, Journal of British Studies 29 (January 1990), 54–55, 58, 75; in the specific context of the universities, see J. Gascoigne, “Church and State Allied: The Failure of Parliamentary Reform of the Universities, 1688–1800” in A.L. Beier, D. Cannadine and J.M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1989), p. 403. 10 See, for example, M. Lobban, “From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly: Peterloo and the Changing Face of Political Crime, c. 1770–1820”, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 10 (1990), 307–52; J. Epstein and D. Thompson (eds.), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–1860 (London, 1982). 11 While the call of Joanna Innes and R. Arthur Burns (Rethinking the Age of Reform, pp. 2–3) for a broader frame of reference when discussing ‘reform’ to include all the areas which contemporaries discussed under that rubric, both within and outside of parliament, is welcome, it should be pointed out that they do not include university reform in their own discussions or challenge the traditional view that the reform of the universities was a project of second-rate importance carried out in the calmer atmosphere of the 1850s. See pp. 57–8; cf. here Volume VI of the History of the University of Oxford. Although the reforms at Oxford are set against the background of “An Era of Reform”, the basic assumption that Oxford students were fundamentally conservative and pro-establishment remains. Laurence Brockliss’s chapter (“The European University in the Age of Revolution, 1789– 1850”, pp. 77–133) confirms the traditional contrast between peaceful ‘Oxbridge’ and the 4 introduction nothing more than the modernization of the curriculum, teaching practices and general functioning of the universities—to improve their efficiency and ‘usefulness’ in the language of the time. This is what historical sociologist Keith Hoskin has termed the ‘predictable advance’ model, which treats developments in higher education as inevitable side-effects of modernization, rather than as specific problems to be accounted for.12 Thus the historian, D.B. Nimmo, can explain “the rise of competitive examinations” in nineteenth-century Oxford as part of a “cumulative and fundamental process of reform effecting the transition from what may be called pre-industrial to modern conditions”, a process affecting not just the university but “the nation as a whole.”13 This study argues, however, that the factors driving university reform at Oxford between 1800 and 1854 (both those changes carried out internally and those introduced by government intervention) were more complex than the current historiography allows. By concentrating on the increasingly problematic relationship between junior and senior members at Oxford, it argues that the British elite were nowhere near as cohesive in this period as most narratives of university reform assume. A focused study of the ancient universities has the potential to tell us much about the British elite as a whole; for, as Laurence Brockliss has pointed out, Oxford and Cambridge educated a much greater proportion of the British elite than higher education institutions in many other European countries including France and Germany.14 Hence they played a more important role in shaping the attitudes and outlook of the British elite than was the case with many continental universities. Instead of opposition drawn along class lines, it is suggested that tensions within the ranks of the elite were frequently played out along the axis of youth and age, of generational difference. Such distinctions were particularly prominent at an institution like Oxford which was chiefly structured according to differences of age and maturity with freshmen distinguished from finalists, undergraduates from bachelors, and perhaps most importantly of all, junior members (undergraduates and bachelors)

revolutionary atmosphere among students at continental European universities, especially in France and Germany (esp. pp. 123–4). 12 K. Hoskin, “The Examination, Disciplinary Power and Rational Schooling”, History of Education 8:2 (June 1979), 135. 13 D.B. Nimmo, “Mark Pattison and the Dilemma of University Examinations” in R. Macleod (ed.), Days of Judgment: Science, Examinations, and the Organization of Knowl- edge in Late Victorian England (Driffield, 1982), p. 153. 14 Brockliss, “The European University in the Age of Revolution”, pp. 83, 119. generational conflict and university reform 5 from the body of senior members. However, it must be remembered that in the world of the university, generational difference was by no means a clear and stable distinction and in reality often meant a gap of only a few years. Yesterday’s undergraduates became tomorrow’s senior members and the term ‘junior’, as used by contemporaries, although usually referring to those officially designated ‘junior members’ (the undergraduates and bachelors), could also be used to refer to the younger MAs, fellows and tutors of colleges who were technically senior members. Nor is it possible to trace just two coherent visions of the university, one belonging to the young and the other to the old. As will become clear, senior members did not always put forward conservative notions, nor were the juniors always the advocates of a progressive, modernizing agenda. The main contention of this book is that the growing tension between undergraduates and their tutors deserves to be taken seriously as a factor influencing the nature and timing of reform at Oxford in the first half of the nineteenth century. While moves to standardize and modernize the curriculum and examination system, both at a college and university level, were frequently driven by a genuine desire to improve standards and to increase efficiency, many, both within and outside Oxford, also saw university reform as a potential means by which to exercise a closer supervision over the activities of undergraduates and to inculcate particular intellectual and moral values. By the same token, as the early nineteenth century saw the emergence of an older, more self-confident undergraduate body, students too began to take an active interest in university reform for the first time, promoting their own ideas and agendas through pamphlets, poems and periodical articles. Histories of university reform at Oxford have tended to focus on particular colleges or individuals (both within and outside the university) who have been seen to play a central role in the reform process.15 By concentrating instead on what may be termed the ‘discourse of university reform’16—the public discussion of possible changes to the curriculum,

15 See, for example, V.H.H. Green, Oxford Common Room: A Study of Lincoln College and Mark Pattison (London, 1957); E.G.W. Bill and J.F.A. Mason, Christ Church and Reform, 1850–1867 (Oxford, 1970); Green, University Reform in Nineteenth-Century Oxford: A Study of Henry Halford Vaughan, 1811–1885; Jones, Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don. 16 For the term “discourse of university reform”, see, in particular, A. Öncü, “Academics: the West in the Discourse of University Reform”, in M. Herper, A. Öncü, H. Kramer (eds.), Turkey and the West: Changing Political and Cultural Identities (London, 1993), pp. 142–76. 6 introduction examination system and structures of authority at Oxford—we are able to access a broader cross-section of attitudes towards reform. In particular, such an approach allows for a more complex understanding of agency within the university reform process. Most studies have tended to assume that the nature of the changes introduced and the timing of reform were determined wholly by the actions of senior members and government officials. Few allow that junior members themselves could at times be instrumental in shaping the character and process of change. However, when we examine the wide range of pamphlets, periodicals and monographs, constituting the public discourse of reform, the growing importance of undergraduates and bachelors and the views they articulated becomes clear. In discussions surrounding the introduction of syllabus changes and stricter examinations at a college level in the mid-to-late eighteenth century as well as the institution of the New Examination Statute in 1800, the potential threat posed by junior members, imbued with dangerous political ideas, featured significantly. Likewise, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, we see undergraduates and bachelors themselves become active participants in the university reform discourse and their views taken increasingly seriously by senior members. As will be argued here, the emergence of junior members as a separate interest group within the university in the years after 1800 played an important role in shaping the various plans of reform put forward by senior members at Oxford in the years preceding government intervention with the Royal Commission of 1850. It is not the aim of this book to write an exhaustive history of university reform at Oxford in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nor does it claim to provide new insight into the lived experience of undergraduates, bachelors or, indeed, senior members at Oxford in this period. It is concerned, quite specifically, with the public debate about university reform and the potential which such a focus has to elucidate the significance of junior members, and of junior-senior relations, more broadly, as a factor shaping the character and timing of changes to the syllabus and examination system. In order to focus on this debate, it pays particular attention to those texts which constituted it: above all, published works dealing with the question of university reform—poems, pamphlets, periodical articles and book-length studies. Other sources, traditionally focused on by historians of university reform, such as college histories, personal correspondence and memoirs are drawn on only in a secondary capacity, where they are found to shed light on the public discourse which forms the investigative focus of this study. generational conflict and university reform 7

To suggest that university reform at Oxford was in part driven by the fears of senior members about the threat posed by undergraduates inspired by revolutionary ideology is not in itself new. More than thirty years ago, Sheldon Rothblatt argued that the decision of the framers of the New Examination Statute to introduce competitive examination was partly driven by a desire to gain greater control over the time and activities of junior members amidst growing fears of domestic Jacobinism in the 1790s.17 However, Rothblatt maintained that such motivations were short-lived in nature, not existing prior to the crisis of the French Revolu- tion and not persisting beyond the early years of the nineteenth century due to the efficacy of the new examinations in winning the approval of undergraduates and in occupying their time. “After 1801”, he wrote, “the new discipline of the Oxford examinations was conspicuous everywhere”18 and with “the nearly universal acceptance of the principle of competitive examinations by undergraduates”, indiscipline was rarely a problem.19 In addition, he maintained that the new atmosphere of intensive competition had profound emotional and psychological effects on students with success in the Cambridge Tripos and Oxford Greats (or final examination) becoming the dominant concern of student life, leaving little time for the pursuit of independent interests.20 Almost without exception, subsequent histories of Oxford and Cambridge have followed Rothblatt’s line about the remarkably limited extent of the impact of fears about junior rebellion on the English universities.21 By contrast, it is suggested here that generational conflict between junior and senior members played a much more significant role in shaping the course of reform at Oxford. The first chapter argues that attempts to counter the possible subversive activities of Oxford undergraduates

17 Rothblatt, “The Student Sub-culture and the Examination System”, pp. 286–7. 18 Ibid., 287. 19 Ibid., 283. 20 S. Rothblatt, “Failure in Early 19th Century Oxford and Cambridge”, History of Educa- tion 15 (1986), 1–21. 21 For acknowledgement (following Rothblatt) of the influence of the French Revolu- tion on the introduction of competitive examinations at Oxford and Cambridge, see, for example, Green, “Reformers and Reform in the University”, pp. 622–3; M.G. Brock, “The Oxford of Peel and Gladstone, 1800–1833” in Brock and Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. VI, p. 8; L. Stone, “Social Control and Intellectual Excellence: Oxbridge and Edinburgh 1560–1983” in N. Phillipson (ed.), Universities, Society, and the Future: A Conference Held on the 400th Anniversary of the University of Edinburgh, 1983 (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 22–3. 8 introduction began not in 1800, but rather with a striking set of earlier reforms brought in at a college level, designed to counter undergraduate involvement in Jacobite riots in the first half of the eighteenth century. It goes on to suggest that the participation of a significant number of college students in the American Revolution and the suspicion that radical democracy was spreading among Oxford undergraduates prompted a number of prominent senior members, including several heads of houses, to come together for the first time to discuss the need for similar changes at a university level. Chapter two outlines the strengthening of these discussions against the background of the French Revolution and the growing fears of domestic Jacobinism which developed in its wake. It argues, moreover, that the main changes introduced in the 1800 Statute, including competitive examination, were prefigured in the earlier reforms introduced at several of the leading colleges, most importantly Christ Church. In so doing, it suggests that there may have been a deliberate intention on the part of the Statute’s framers to try and introduce at a university level changes which were held to have successfully increased the ability of senior members to supervise the activities of juniors within their own colleges. Thus the Statute of 1800 is treated as something more than it claims to be in its preamble—a purely practical move to render more efficient the method of examining candidates for the BA.22 Similarly, this study argues that the fear that undergraduates might imbibe revolutionary ideas and rebel against senior authority did not end with the introduction of competitive examination in 1800 but continued to play a decisive role in shaping the nature of reform at Oxford until the Royal Commission of 1850. As chapter three shows, many students interpreted the Statutes of 1800 and 1807 (which consolidated the changes introduced seven years earlier) as reactionary measures designed to strengthen senior control over them. Consequently, growing numbers of undergraduates and bachelors began to publish their own views on university reform and to articulate an increasingly coherent threat of rebellion. Following the suggestion of Lewis Feuer that the reactionary measures of Metternich in the years after 1815 produced for the first time a sense of ‘generational consciousness’ among students in continental Europe,23 this chapter argues that it is possible to see the emergence of

22 G.R.M. Ward and J. Heywood (eds.), Oxford University Statutes Vol. I (London, 1845), p. 29. 23 L. Feuer, Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements (London, 1969), pp. 63–4. generational conflict and university reform 9 a similar sense of shared identity among Oxford’s junior members in the years following the Statutes of 1800 and 1807. Chapters four and five analyse the importance of the growing involvement of junior members in the university reform debate as a factor influencing the nature of the changes introduced at Oxford prior to the Royal Commission of 1850. Chapter four shows how the various proposals for reform in the 1820s and 1830s may be related to competing groups within the university’s body of senior members, each with its own ideas about how to resolve the widening breach between junior and senior members. Dominant throughout much of the 1820s was the plan of the Oriel Noetics, who argued, with the framers of 1800, that limited reform was necessary in order to preserve established authority. While this included establishing a meaningful dialogue with junior members, reform was conceived only within the limits of the traditional classical syllabus and undergraduates were discouraged from publishing their own views. With the outbreak of revolution in France in 1830, however, university opinion turned against the Noetic plan as likely to foster junior rebellion; instead, we see the emergence of a nascent Oxford Movement around John Henry Newman which articulated what first appeared to be a fundamentally conservative approach to the problem. While the Noetics had stressed the need to cultivate maturity in undergraduates, those around Newman privileged a romantic notion of childhood and the virtue of unquestioning obedience. However, important questions are raised about the conservative character of the movement by an examination of the significant number of student journalists, active in the 1810s and early 1820s, who went on to become prominent Tractarians, including Newman himself. Similar doubts emerge when we consider the active recruitment of junior members by Tractarian leaders in their capacity as college tutors and the sheer degree of personal influence which they exercised over undergraduates. Chapter five examines the dramatic shift in the perception of Tractari- anism within Oxford over the course of the late 1830s and 1840s. It argues that from being seen as a movement which encouraged students to value established tradition it came itself, within a few short years, to be feared as the locus of a revolutionary youth movement engaging in crypto-Catholic theological speculations as threatening to the Anglican establishment as any inspired by pro-Jacobin sentiment. In particular, it is suggested that deteriorating relations between junior and senior members against the background of Tractarianism ought to be taken seriously as a factor influencing the appointment of the Royal Oxford Commission in 1850. Many historians of university reform, including Rothblatt, have maintained that 10 introduction the mid-century reforms which saw the introduction of degrees in modern history, natural science and theology were inspired purely by a desire to improve standards and modernize the curriculum.24 However, using the evidence submitted to the Commission as well as the Commissioners’ own report, it will be suggested here that they were at least equally concerned with the regulation of student behaviour. In particular, the Com- missioners hoped through the abolition of religious tests, the widening of access and the broadening of the syllabus to encourage a more diverse student body less susceptible to control by any one faction. It may be asked why changes at Oxford rather than Cambridge form the central focus of this study. Certainly, it is usual, whenever scholars have discussed university reform as a wider issue, to speak of ‘the reform of the ancient universities’ or of ‘Oxbridge’ as though there were no important differences between developments at Oxford and Cambridge.25 This has been taken to such an extent, in particular, by historians of European universities, that ‘Oxbridge’ has often been treated in the words of historian, Paul Deslandes, as a “cohesive cultural unit”,26 an alternative model of university development, to compare with the better known French and German models.27 This tendency may be understood as the product of two historiographical trends: firstly, the continued practice of treating British experience as separate (and different) from European developments, which has the side-effect of minimizing differences among British institutions; and secondly, an over-concentration on government-driven (as opposed to internally-introduced) reform which happened to occur at both Oxford and Cambridge at the same time. When the question of internal change is focused on, however, there appear important differences between the two universities. While both witnessed a similar rise in the average age of undergraduates and experi-

24 Rothblatt, “The Student Sub-culture and the Examination System”, p. 303. 25 For the use of the term ‘Oxbridge’, see, for example, Rothblatt, “The Student Sub- culture and the Examination System”, pp. 247–303; J.A. Mangan, “Lamentable Barbar- ians and Pitiful Sheep: Rhetoric of Protest and Pleasure in Late Victorian and Edwardian ‘Oxbridge’ ”, Victorian Studies 34:4 (Summer 1991), pp. 473–90; R.D. Anderson, Universities and Elites in Britain Since 1800 (London, 1992), p. 10. 26 P.R. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, IA, 2005), p. 11. 27 See, for example, C. Charle, “Patterns” in W. Rüegg (ed.), A History of the University in Europe Volume III. Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1800–1945) (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 33–80; R.D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlighten- ment to 1914 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 191–208; Brockliss, “The European University in the Age of Revolution, 1789–1850”, pp. 125–6. generational conflict and university reform 11 enced the emergence of a self-conscious student estate in the early years of the nineteenth century, the relationship between these developments and the course of university reform at Oxford and Cambridge differed significantly. As historians such as John Gascoigne have shown, Cambridge, with its Whig and low-church traditions, had enjoyed a much more constructive relationship with the continental Enlightenment in the mid-to- late eighteenth century, initiating its own programme of reform some seventy years before Oxford embarked on a defensive policy of change in the wake of the French Revolution.28 Cambridge saw the beginnings of competitive examination as early as 1747 and relaxed its stringent religious tests in response to parliamentary criticism in 1772. Likewise, recent scholarship, in particular, the work of Andrew Warwick, has shown that despite significant opposition from certain sections of the body of senior members, Cambridge continued to demonstrate a more open attitude towards curricular reform, visible, above all in the introduction of French analytical mathematics to the undergraduate syllabus, in the first decades of the nineteenth century.29 In Oxford, by contrast, the syllabus changes introduced by the Statute of 1800 served primarily to entrench further the traditional curriculum of classical studies and divinity and studiously avoided all innovation. Cambridge certainly saw its fair share of conflict between junior and senior members in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.30 Indeed, with its reputation for low-church (and even non-conformist) attitudes, many in Oxford viewed it with suspicion, particularly in the mid-to-late eighteenth century when it was closely associated with the deist views of Isaac Newton and his new mathematical theories.31 However, despite the emergence of an older and increasingly confident student body at Cambridge and a number of memorable clashes between undergraduates and the university authorities, particularly in the early nineteenth

28 See, for example, J. Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989); A. Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago, 2003). 29 See Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics. 30 See D.A. Winstanley, Unreformed Cambridge: A Study of Certain Aspects of the Uni- versity in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1935), pp. 16–25, 212–25; D.A. Winstanley, Early Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 18–28, 419–23. However, known for its Whig sympathies, Cambridge witnessed significantly lower levels of Jacobite rioting than Oxford. See B. Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746 (London, 1980), p. 116. 31 See below, pp. 44–5. 12 introduction century,32 there does not appear to have been the same kind of direct causal relationship between generational conflict and university reform as existed at Oxford in this period. On the whole, changes to the curriculum and examination system seem to have been carried out in response to developments in continental Europe and to have aimed much more decidedly at modernizing the type of education provided than was the case at Oxford. An equally important concern seems to have been the cre- ation of a system of education more appropriate for the new, older type of undergraduate then entering the university. This is particularly noticeable in the debate surrounding the introduction of competitive examination at Cambridge in the mid-to-late the eighteenth century.33 These differences were, moreover, frequently highlighted by undergraduates at both universities in their own contributions to the reform debate. Thus, students at Oxford expressed the wish that their university might treat them more like mature men (as they believed to be the case at Cambridge),34 while students at Cambridge gloried in what they considered their superior and more strenuous system of education.35 In stressing the volatility of elite youth in this period and the fear which the emergence of the undergraduate body as an independent interest group engendered in senior university members and MPs alike, this book also seeks to point out important continuities between developments at Oxford and the history of European universities and their relationship with the state in the first half of the nineteenth century. In studies of university reform in continental Europe, far more stress has been placed on the role of social and political conflict in shaping developments in higher education.36 At the centre of such analyses has been the importance of student participation in continental revolutions and the role of generational conflict in determining the nature of higher education reform. Such works have argued that the generation of students growing up in the wake of the French Revolution developed an unprecedented sense of ‘youth’ or ‘generational’ consciousness and began for the first time to articulate coherent demands with regard to politics and the reform of higher educa-

32 Winstanley, Early Victorian Cambridge, pp. 18–28. 33 See below, pp. 26–7. 34 See below, p. 113. 35 See below, pp. 91–2. 36 See, for example, the conference “Continuity and Change in the European University in the Age of Liberal Revolution” held at Magdalen College, Oxford 27–29 March 1987, from which a selection of papers were published in History of Universities 7 (1988) and 8 (1989). generational conflict and university reform 13 tion. In particular, they expressed a desire for a broad-based curriculum with modern subjects and greater intellectual freedom. Such issues frequently lay behind student involvement in and support for the French Revolution of 1830 and the various continental revolutions of 1848.37 His- torians of European universities have recognized the role which such pressure ‘from below’ played in shaping the changes which took place in the middle and second part of the century, mostly as a result of direct government intervention. In order to prevent the spectre of further student rebellion, post-revolutionary governments in France, Germany and Austria chose to accede to some of the demands made by students and to modernize university curricula, examinations and teaching methods.38 More general historical works seeking to establish the importance of youth consciousness and generational conflict as mechanisms of historical change have likewise drawn upon the evidence of student participation in the continental revolutions of the first half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most influential of such studies has been John R. Gillis’s Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770- Present (1981). Seeking to integrate changes in generational relations within a wider socio-economic analysis of the 1848 revolution in Germany, he declared: “In 1848, the journeymen’s movement and student radicalism came together . . . in what seemed the long-awaited revenge of the sons against the fathers.”39 Such studies have been far more influenced by the work of sociologists on student subcultures and generational identity than have historians of reform at the English universities. Following the student radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of sociologists, notably, Lewis Feuer, argued that generational conflict ought to be taken seriously as a factor in socio-cultural change especially in the field of higher education. In his 1969 Conflict of Genera- tions, Feuer made particular use of evidence of student involvement in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. While he considered generational struggle to be a “universal theme of history”,40 he laid special weight on the French

37 See, for example, E.H. Altbach, “Vanguard of Revolt: Students and Politics in Central Europe, 1815–1848” in S.M. Lipset and P.G. Altbach (eds.), Students in Revolt (Boston, 1969), pp. 451–74; P. Robertson, “Students on the Barricades: Germany and Austria, 1848”, Political Science Quarterly 84 (1969), 367–79; J.G. Gallaher, The Students of Paris and the Revolution of 1848 (Carbondale and London, 1980). 38 See Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914, pp. 66–87. 39 J.R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770-Present (New York and London, 1981), p. 92. 40 Feuer, Conflict of Generations, p. 27. 14 introduction

Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars as “the prime factors in the disrup- tion of the generational equilibrium in Europe”.41 According to Feuer, these events led to an unprecedented destabilization in continental European generational relations and a half century characterized as never before by youth consciousness. “In their wake”, he wrote, “came not only the German movement of Karl Follen but also the Young Italy of Giuseppe Mazzini. No previous age in European history would have so honored the word “Young”; youth, with its romantic enthusiasm displaced the old with its felt mission to rule.”42 Through an adaptation of the work of sociologists like Feuer, Gillis and other historians of European universities have stressed the importance of generational conflict as a mechanism of historical change. As Gillis has argued, the history of youth has been decidedly under-researched. What attempts there have been to write such a history have failed to take due account of “the feelings and perceptions of those involved, the young themselves . . . For, however important the historical context may be, it is the consciousness of the young, determined in part by the past experiences of their age group, that has determined the direction of change.”43 Above all, he argued, “youth’s own role in creating . . . social and cultural forms” must be elucidated.44 Such a connection between social unrest and university reform has rarely been contemplated with regard to the English universities, even though, as we have seen, it has become a significant feature in the interpretation of government-directed political and social reform in the 1830s and 1840s. More often than not, the mere idea of revolutionary sentiment among undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge has been flatly denied.45 In the words of Laurence Brockliss, “student radicalism was very much a continental problem. Oxford and Cambridge students were scarcely renowned for their anti-establishment views”.46 More recently, in the third volume of the History of the University in Europe, Lieve Gevers and Louis Vos have remarked similarly that while “a—more or less organized—collective action by students under their own leadership to influence society” had been a key factor behind university reform in conti-

41 Feuer, Conflict of Generations, p. 25. 42 Ibid., 34. 43 Gillis, Youth and History, p. xi. 44 Ibid., ix. 45 See, for example, E. Ashby and M. Anderson, The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain (London, 1970), pp. 10–11; M.I. Thomis and P. Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain 1789–1848 (London, 1977), p. 131. 46 Brockliss, “The European University in the Age of Revolution, 1789–1850”, pp. 123–4. generational conflict and university reform 15 nental Europe,47 “the English student generations of the early nineteenth century were little moved by this”.48 As a result, histories of Oxford and Cambridge have rarely, if ever, been written with a focus on the so-called ‘Age of Revolution’. Far more common is an examination of developments over the course of the nineteenth century or the Victorian era, which the tendency to treat university reform as just another aspect of nineteenth- century reforming zeal, does much to explain.49 Histories of individual subject areas, such as classical studies, have likewise tended to underplay the importance of the social and political context in which reforms were introduced. They also rarely consider changes within the English universities against the wider background of curricular reform in the universities of continental Europe. The standard work is an institutionally (or, occa- sionally, nationally) specific study which takes relatively little account of events outside this sphere.50

47 L. Gevers and L. Vos, “Student Movements” in Rüegg (ed.), A History of the University in Europe Volume III, pp. 269–70. 48 Gevers and Vos, “Student Movements”, p. 272. Cf. the claim of A.D. Harvey (“Euro- pean Universities in a Period of Change 1789–1815”, Higher Education Review 23:3 (1991), 43) that during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars Oxford and Cambridge continued to occupy “the essentially marginal position in which they had apparently slumbered in the eighteenth century”; see also the comments of R.D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914, p. 70. The students at Oxford and Cambridge, he wrote, had no grievances to speak of: “In England, students were members of the class which already held political power, and saw their university years as a training in public life.” While “individual dissidents might be punished”, this was “usually for religious rather than political reasons.” 49 See, for example, W.R. Ward, Georgian Oxford. University Politics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1958); W.R. Ward, Victorian Oxford; S. Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons. Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London, 1968); Engel, From Clergyman to Don. The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford; L.S. Sutherland and L.G. Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford. Vol. V The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1986); Brock and Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. VI Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1; Jones, Intellect and Character in Victorian England. Histories of reform in Cambridge, where the Whig interpretation of British history was less dominant, tend to be less devoted to this chronological template. See, for example, Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution; P. Searby, A History of the University of Cambridge Vol. III 1750–1870 (Cambridge, 1997). 50 For studies of classics at particular institutions, see, for example, C. Stray (ed.), Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning 1800–2000 (London, 2007) and C. Stray (ed.), Clas- sics in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Cambridge: Curriculum, Culture and Community, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society Supplement 24 (Cambridge, 1999). For nationally specific studies, see, for example, C. Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Uni- versities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford, 1998), L.T. Pearcy, The Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America (Waco, Texas, 2005); I. Gildenhard and M. Ruehl (eds.), Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politics in Germany in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wilamowitz (London, 2003). 16 introduction

Consequently, unlike in other countries, developments in English higher education remain significantly under-theorized with important changes often taken for granted, rather than treated as problems to be accounted for. A typical explanation, for example, of the 1800 Examination Statute at Oxford is that provided by Peter Slee. Rather than attempting to connect the introduction of competitive examination and a uniform syllabus with contemporary political events, such changes are explained primarily as the product of a modernizing desire for greater intellectual proficiency.51 “The reforms of 1800”, he wrote, “ . . . aimed simply to regulate and to standardize; to enact a basic minimum level of attainment for all undergraduates reading for a degree”.52 The tendency to exclude developments in England from accounts of higher education reform in the rest of Europe has also meant that most work on the English universities has been non-comparative in nature.53 Often limited to the consideration of a single institution, there has been little sustained attempt to place developments against a wider political and socio-cultural background. If the broader context has been alluded to, it has rarely encompassed a field wider than the rest of the country; even comparisons with the Scottish universities are fairly difficult to find.54 Thus, while historians like P.B. Nockles and Colin Matthew have taken pains to relate changes in the curricular and examination system at Oxford to the cultural and political crisis of 1828–32, they have given almost no consideration to the possible impact of events in continental Europe.55

51 P. Slee, “The Oxford Idea of a Liberal Education, 1800–1850: The Invention of Tradi- tion and the Manufacture of Practice”, History of Universities 7 (1988), 64. 52 Ibid. Cf. the similar explanation provided by R.D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914, p. 195. 53 For exceptions, see Brockliss, “The European University in the Age of Revolution”; Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914. 54 For exceptions, see C.J.W. Parker, “The Development of History Courses in British Universities 1850–1975”, Exeter University MA dissertation, 1976; Stone, “Social Control and Intellectual Excellence: Oxbridge and Edinburgh 1560–1983”, pp. 1–29; C. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?: Women in British Universities, 1870–1939 (London, 1995). C.W.J. Withers and R.J. Mayhew, “Rethinking ‘Disciplinary’ History: Geography in British Univer- sities, c.1580–1887”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27:1 (2002), 11–29; for a comparison involving Trinity College, Dublin, see C. Stray, “From Oral to Written Examinations: Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin 1700–1914”, History of Universities 20:2 (Octo- ber 2005), 76–130. 55 For an acknowledgement of the importance of the domestic crisis of 1828–32, see Matthew, “Noetics, Tractarians, and the Reform of the University of Oxford in the Nine- teenth Century”, 197, 201; Nockles, “An Academic Counter-Revolution: Newman and Trac- tarian Oxford’s Idea of a University”, 137–9. Both articles refer briefly to a reaction to the secularizing tendencies of the French Revolution (Matthew, p. 197; Nockles, p. 138) but generational conflict and university reform 17

As we have seen, only Sheldon Rothblatt has gone some way towards acknowledging a relationship between events on the continent and developments in the ancient English universities. In addition to suggesting that the introduction of competitive examination at Oxford in 1800 was influenced by the fear that the undergraduate body might be infiltrated by revolutionary ideas from France,56 he was among the first to take on board aspects of the sociological interpretation of educational systems as agents of social control. He has likewise criticized the tendency to discuss the history of liberal education in England as a story of predictable advance linked to a deterministic theory of the inevitability of modernization. “How is it”, he asks, “that we can even speak about the ‘evolution’ of liberal education?” Such a “biological and perhaps even Darwinian metaphor” should be set aside, he argues, as fundamentally inappropriate to a discussion of an ideal which has mutated over time and been transformed by human agency in specific historical contexts.57 An analysis of the relationship between generational conflict and university reform also helps to focus the attention of historians once more on the importance of change over time. Much recent work on Oxford and Cambridge in the nineteenth century looks neither at the various changes to the curriculum and examination system, nor attempts to explain them. Instead, historians like Paul Deslandes, in his study of undergraduate masculinity at ‘Oxbridge’ between 1850 and 1920, have drawn on the social construction theories of Michel Foucault and others, to elucidate the primary characteristics of a distinct undergraduate subculture, as it was marked out by various sets of culturally-specific distinctions, above all, gender58

do not connect this with any formal changes to the university’s syllabus or examination system. 56 Rothblatt, “The Student Sub-culture and the Examination System”, pp. 286–7. Cf. Ward (Victorian Oxford, p. 13) where a tentative connection is made between the insistence on compulsory divinity in the Examination Statute of 1800 and fears about the religious orthodoxy of undergraduates against the background of the French Revolution. 57 S. Rothblatt, “The Limbs of Osiris: Liberal Education in the English-Speaking World” in S. Rothblatt and B. Wittrock (eds.), The European and American University Since 1800: Historical and Sociological Essays (Cambridge, 1993), p. 21. 58 For a focus on gender, see Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920. Despite devoting a chapter to “The Transition from Boyhood to Manhood” (pp. 48–82), it is assumed that the language of manliness, as used in the context of the university, was always overtly gendered in significance which neglects its frequent, alternative meaning of ‘adult’ and ‘mature’. For the importance of maturity in understandings of manliness at Oxford, see H. Ellis, “Boys, Youths and Semi-Men: Maturity and Manliness in Early Nineteenth Century Oxford” in S. Brady and J. Arnold (eds.), What is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World (London, 18 introduction and ‘race’.59 While such work provides valuable insights into the ways in which undergraduates have constructed their own identities, drawing on a range of different cultural discourses, it tends to treat these undergraduate subcultures as though they existed in some way independently of the university’s senior members and changed little over the course of several decades. The important role played by dialectical relations between opposing, yet interconnected, groups in determining the identity formation processes of undergraduates as well as the nature and course of historical events, more generally, is often obscured. Very few scholars in recent years have advocated a return to conflict theory and a study of the structural relations between competing interest groups. This tendency has no doubt been encouraged by the lack of willingness we have already mentioned to see the English universities as potential sites of social and political unrest. It is true that has been some criticism recently of this concentration on recovering processes of identity formation in the history of universities. In a conference dialogue published in The History of Education, the American historian of universities, Joseph Kett, has called for a renewed focus on the need to explain change over time.60 “The process of change”, he cautions, “is a subject that historians of higher education need to consider more rigorously than they have.”61 Central to this challenge, he suggests, is the need to rekindle interest in the ‘how?’ and the ‘why?’ of university reform.62 In particular, he urges an examination of “the institutional dynamics” and “specific structural connections” between the various interest groups and fields of knowledge within higher educational institutions.63 Such statements recall the comments of sociologists like Lewis Feuer and historians like John R. Gillis who advocated the importance of generational conflict as a mechanism of historical change and

2011), pp. 263–83; for a similarly exclusive focus on gender identity for a later period, see S. Levsen, “Constructing Elite Identities: University Students, Military Masculinity and the Consequences of the Great War in Britain and Germany”, Past and Present 198 (February 2008), 147–83. 59 For the importance of distinctions of ‘race’, see P.R. Deslandes, “ ‘The Foreign Ele- ment’: Newcomers and the Rhetoric of Race, Nation, and Empire in ‘Oxbridge’ Under- graduate Culture, 1850–1920”, The Journal of British Studies 37:1 (January 1998), 54–90. 60 P. Mattingly, K. Jarausch, J. Craig, J. Kett and J. Turner, “Universities in Europe: North American Perspectives on European Historiography”, History of Education 37:3 (May 2008), 478. 61 Ibid., 479. 62 Ibid., 479. 63 Ibid., 484. generational conflict and university reform 19 have had such a significant impact on scholars studying developments within European universities in the nineteenth century.64 In calling for a renewed focus on the structures of power and the motivations behind university reform, Kett suggests a fruitful direction for future work on the history of England’s ancient universities. It is hoped that by attempting to shed new light on the complex factors which shaped the reform process at Oxford in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, this book will make a valid contribution to this project.

64 See, for example, Gillis, Youth and History, p. x: “If the history of youth is to be written, it must focus on that interface where the expectations of the young and those of their elders interact in a dynamic manner.”

Chapter One

RIOT, REVOLUTION AND ‘REFORM’ IN THE COLLEGES, 1714–1789

When historians have sought to account for the New Examination Statute of 1800, which saw the introduction of competitive examination and the first uniform syllabus at Oxford, they have generally seen it as marking the beginning of a serious concern to improve educational standards and modernize the curriculum after the laxity of the eighteenth century.1 Few scholars have considered the possibility that as well as a genuine desire for reform such changes may have been driven by other, more conservative motivations; at most, it has been suggested that the Statute of 1800 might have been designed, at least in part, to bolster the authority of senior members amid fears of domestic Jacobinism in the 1790s—in other words, that it constituted a defensive reaction to the French Revolution.2 What will be suggested here, by contrast, is that to be understood correctly the provisions of the statute must be seen in the context of more than half a century of troubled relations between junior and senior members at Oxford and measures taken at a college level to gain greater control over the activities and reading material of undergraduates. The major spur for such changes was the enthusiastic participation of students in repeated outbreaks of Jacobite rioting in the early years of the Hanover- ian monarchy, and again following the failed rebellion of 1745. So worrying was the behaviour of undergraduates that a royal visitation of the university was seriously threatened. Despite the fact that a majority of Oxford’s senior members were themselves Jacobite in sympathy, a number of colleges began to take active steps to curb the rebellious behaviour of students, their fear of government interference being greater than their

1 See, for example, Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914, p. 195; Slee, “The Oxford Idea of a Liberal Education, 1800–1850: The Invention of Tradition and the Manufacture of Practice”, 64. 2 See, for example, W.R. Ward, Victorian Oxford, p. 13; Rothblatt, “The Student Sub- culture and the Examination System”, pp. 283–7; S. Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates, recognizable as such” in S. Rothblatt, The Modern University and its Discontents: The Fate of Newman’s Legacies in Britain and America (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 154–7; Green, “Reformers and Reform in the University”, pp. 621–2; Stone, “Social Control and Intellectual Excel- lence: Oxbridge and Edinburgh” (1560–1983), p. 24. 22 chapter one loyalty to the ‘Old Interest’. In important aspects, particularly the introduction of comprehensive reading lists and regular examinations, these measures enacted at a college level presaged key features of the 1800 Stat- ute. As the final section will argue, it was the threat perceived to come from religious and political radicals in the 1760s and 1770s, particularly in the context of the American Revolution, which produced the first calls for the implementation of such measures at a university level. As will be shown in the second chapter, the French Revolution only accelerated a process which was already well under way. In comparison with other studies of reform at Oxford, a stronger contrast is drawn here with developments at Cambridge. It is argued that the factors driving change at the two universities in the eighteenth century were quite different. Historians such as Lawrence Stone have been right to claim that both Oxford and Cambridge were facing a set of unprecedented challenges in the early part of the eighteenth century, not least a rising student age and the related appearance of a more mature and independent- minded undergraduate.3 However, it will be suggested here that the two universities reacted in quite different ways to these changes. Cambridge, on the one hand, made an effort to respond positively, reforming both its examination and curriculum under the influence of the Scientific Revolu- tion and Enlightenment thought. Reformers commented frequently on the need to provide an education more appropriate for students, who were, in effect, now grown men and not the school boys of years gone by.4 This attitude, however, would seem to have been the product of Cam- bridge’s peculiar Whig and low-church traditions as well as the remarkable degree of favour the university received from the Whig ministry in the years following the Hanoverian succession. Conditions at Oxford were, however, very different. Although both universities witnessed episodes of undergraduate indiscipline and clashes between junior and senior members in the first half of the eighteenth century, it was the student body at Oxford which gained a reputation for violent rioting in the Jacobite cause. Far from attempting to meet the needs of the new, older type of student, a number of leading Oxford colleges, Christ Church in particular, took steps to restrict further the traditional syllabus of classical studies and divinity and to increase the control of college authorities over the

3 See, for example, L. Stone, “The Size and Composition of the Oxford Student Body 1580–1909” in Stone (ed.), The University in Society Vol. I (Princeton, 1974), pp. 3–110. 4 See below, p. 26. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 23 activities of junior members. By not sufficiently acknowledging the differences, not only in the timing, but also in the motivations driving the reforms introduced at Oxford and Cambridge, historians working on the English universities tend to reinforce the view, found frequently in other areas of historiography, that the British elite enjoyed a degree of unity and cohesion during this period unknown in other European countries. By presenting a somewhat different picture of university reform at Oxford in which conservative motivations, rooted firmly in the eighteenth-century experience of the university, may also have influenced the decision to introduce competitive examination and a uniform syllabus in 1800, it is hoped that this popular narrative of British exceptionalism may be called into question.5

The ‘New Independent Student’6 and Meritocratic Reform at Cambridge

Where historians have been right to consider Oxford and Cambridge together is in pointing out that both universities were confronted by important social changes and shifts in ideas about parenting during the eighteenth century which combined to encourage a much more independent-minded type of undergraduate.7 Thanks to the detailed statistical work of Lawrence Stone, we can see that the average age at which students were matriculating at Oxford rose by more than a year from 17.4 years of age in the late seventeenth century to 18.5 in 1810. As the median age rose, the percentage of students under seventeen fell significantly from 37% in 1686 to just 16% at the end of the eighteenth century.8 Even more importantly, the majority of students were now reaching twenty-one and thus the legal age of majority before leaving university. These were what Sheldon Rothblatt has termed “the first undergraduates recognizable as such”.9 In carrying out his own calculations for Cambridge Tripos students, Rothblatt found similar conclusions. The percentage of students sixteen years and younger he estimated to have fallen from around 12%

5 For the relationship between the changes made to the classical curriculum at Oxford and generational conflict at the university, see H. Ellis, “‘A Manly and Generous Disci- pline’?: Classical Studies and Generational Conflict in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Oxford”, History of Universities 25:2 (2011), 143–72. 6 Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates, recognizable as such”, p. 157. 7 See Rothblatt, “The Student Sub-culture and the Examination System”, pp. 247–303. 8 Stone, “The Size and Composition of the Oxford Student Body 1580–1909”, pp. 97–98 (Tables 6 and 7). 9 Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates recognizable as such”, pp. 106–78. 24 chapter one in the middle of the eighteenth century to around 2% in the 1820s.10 The reasons for this were undoubtedly complex but, as he suggests, one of the most important was the decision of parents to keep their sons longer at other types of school (particularly public schools) in order to send them to university only when the worst of the “awkward interval” between boyhood and manhood was over.11 Also contributing to a rising average student age was the fact that over the course of the eighteenth century far more degrees were being awarded, which meant that undergraduates stayed in residence for longer than their counterparts a century or even half a century earlier.12 However, it was not simply that students were on average older. There is evidence to suggest that college tutors, responsible for the vast majority of undergraduate teaching, were becoming younger at both Oxford and Cambridge.13 As John Gascoigne has shown, the number of Church of England livings acquired by colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge rose sharply over the course of the eighteenth century. As these were filled by college fellows in order of seniority, the more livings were acquired, the quicker the succession of fellows to these positions and the younger on average the fellows left in residence.14 Anecdotal evidence also seems to confirm this picture. Referring to late-eighteenth-century Cambridge, the antiquary, William Cole, claimed that because of the “fatal Increase of their College livings, the succession [of fellows] is so quick that the Government of the Scholars falls into the hands of the boys themselves”.15 A similar view of developments in Oxford was expressed in a series of articles published by Richard Newton, the founder of Hertford College, in the General Evening Post between January 1750 and July 1751. The present- day colleges, he wrote, “consist . . . wholly of young men, with a power still of choosing their own governor, the true cause of the want of discipline

10 Rothblatt, “The Student Sub-culture and the Examination System”, p. 249. 11 S. Rothblatt, “Supply and Demand in the Writing of University History since around 1790: 1. The Awkward Interval” in Rothblatt (ed.), The Modern University and its Discon- tents, p. 335. 12 For Oxford, see Stone, “The Size and Composition of the Oxford Student Body”, p. 95; for Cambridge see J.A. Venn, Oxford and Cambridge Matriculations 1544–1906 (Cambridge, 1908), p. 13. 13 Rothblatt, (“The Awkward Interval”, p. 348) remarks that “new dons” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were “scarcely older than the undergraduates whom they taught.” 14 J. Gascoigne, “Maths and Meritocracy: The Emergence of the Cambridge Mathemati- cal Tripos”, Social Studies of Science 14 (1984), 562–3. 15 British Library, Add. MS 5859, fo. 277. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 25 in this place.”16 In addition, the more rapid succession to college livings meant that the ratio of senior to junior members was also depressed; in other words, not only were tutors becoming younger; there were also fewer of them.17 By the middle years of the century, it was clear that both Oxford and Cambridge were facing a set of unprecedented social changes which were putting new pressures on relations between junior and senior members. Lending support to the idea that the British elite were willing and able to adapt to changing circumstances, there is considerable evidence that Cambridge did indeed respond positively to these challenges. As the work of John Gascoigne and others has shown, the early years of the eighteenth century saw the principle of competitive examination introduced alongside traditional university disputations and a modern curriculum based on mathematics and natural philosophy take over from the old, scholas- tic syllabus based largely on classical studies.18 A formerly minor point of the Elizabethan statutes gradually became more important, namely that a candidate, after fulfilling all the requirements for the BA degree, could be questioned in the ‘public schools’ by any MA wishing to do so. By 1710, the traditional Ordo Senioritatis had been divided into a first and second Tripos, indicating that a finer grading of candidates was required. This, in turn, suggests the growing importance of the new examinations.19 It is clear, in any case, that the examinations were well established by 1735 when we read in a letter from the poet, Thomas Gray, that undergraduates were required to “sit in the Theatre [Senate House] for three days, from eight in the morning till five at night”; the first two days were taken up with questions in Latin from any MA who wished to take part and the final day was composed of examinations in groups of six by the Moderator “as long as he will, and in what science he pleases”.20 These groups of six were decided on the basis of an assessment of comparable ability thus proving that there was a strong meritocratic element to the examination even in its early days. By 1747/8, the lists of those

16 R. Newton, General Evening Post, 9–11 January, 11–13 January, 29–31 March, 14–16 June 1750, 9–11 July 1751. 17 Rothblatt, “The Student Sub-culture and the Examination System”, p. 248. 18 J. Gascoigne, “Politics, Patronage and Newtonianism: The Cambridge Example”, His- torical Journal 27:1 (1984), 1–24; J. Gascoigne, Science, Politics and Universities in Europe, 1600–1800 (Aldershot, 1998). 19 Gascoigne, “Maths and Meritocracy”, 549. 20 The Correspondence of Horace Walpole, Vols. 13–14, ed. W.S. Lewis, (New Haven, Conn., 1948), p. 78. 26 chapter one who had successfully completed the examination were printed for the first time, and in 1753 they were divided into the classes of Wranglers, Senior and Junior Optimes, revealing a growing interest in the results and in assessing undergraduate achievement more accurately.21 The meritocratic element was also stressed by those responsible for introducing and administering the new examination. In a pamphlet of 1751, designed to promote the competitive principle, the Master of Corpus Christi College, John Green, pointed to the fact that it promoted “an Ambition to excel” in undergraduates and stressed the “Improvements they do make in Learn- ing, especially in mathematics and philosophical Learning [which] are often extraordinary for Persons of their Age”.22 An anonymous pamphlet published the previous year in 1750 similarly praised the unprecedented academic achievement among students since the introduction of the new examination. The author of the pamphlet could think of no period, when [Learning’s] different Branches were in a more flourishing Condition: Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy, are so generally, and so exactly understood, that more than twenty in every year, of the Candidates for a Bachelor of Arts Degree, are able to demonstrate the principal Proposi- tions in the Principia; and most other Books of the first Character on those Subjects.23 It also seems that success in the examination soon became crucial in the appointment of college fellows in Cambridge. As Gascoigne has shown, all Senior Wranglers between 1753 and 1800 (with the exception of one) and a majority of Wranglers were awarded fellowships.24 When proposing the institution of further (annual) public examinations in 1774, James Lambert, Regius Professor of Greek, looked back at the development of the BA examination and argued that Cambridge had recognized the challenge posed by the rising student age and devised a demanding, modern course, more appropriate for the new kind of student. “We have long found”, he wrote, “that we cannot govern our Youth here now, as Youth . . . were wont to be governed. And we have so far accommodated to the times, as to relax of our boyish discipline” and “to substitute more suitable discipline in its stead”. Taking the form of “laws more fitted for the man” than the boy, he wrote, the university had “endeavoured, by every possible

21 Gascoigne, “Maths and Meritocracy”, 550. 22 [J. Green], Considerations on the Expediency of Making, and the Manner of Conducting the Late Regulations at Cambridge (London, 1751), p. 15. 23 The Academic (London, 1750), pp. 23–4. 24 Gascoigne, “Maths and Meritocracy”, 561. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 27 incentive to study” to make students “ambitious of acquiring every manly attainment”.25 However, it is important to make clear that the reasons behind the development of a meritocratic ethos at Cambridge are to be sought in those political, religious and cultural traditions peculiar to that university, rather than to the British elite as a whole. In contrast with Oxford in 1800, the introduction of competitive examinations at Cambridge went hand in hand with a dramatic restructuring of the traditional curriculum around natural philosophy and mathematics. Unlike Oxford, Cam- bridge had, from the middle part of the sixteenth century at least, won a reputation as a university which welcomed “novelty” and was suspected of being “a nest of puritans”.26 As Gascoigne has shown, it was precisely Cambridge’s latitudinarian churchmen who proved receptive to the new ideas developed in the Scientific Revolution.27 Typical here was John Moore, who, in his sermons as a fellow of Clare College, used metaphors drawn from recent scientific developments and referred, for example, to the “ingenious anatomical” work of the Flemish natural philosopher, Jan Baptist van Helmont.28 While the ideas of Descartes made little headway at Oxford, Cambridge undergraduate teaching had become suffused with the Cartesian geometry through the efforts of the Cambridge Platonists, most importantly Henry More, who had been particularly influential at the university in the years of the Interregnum.29 As well as adapting its own curriculum to include new ideas from the continent, Cambridge played an active part in both the Scientific Revo- lution and the development of Enlightenment thought. This was chiefly due to the work of Isaac Newton, who was particularly committed in his role as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, developing and discussing his ground-breaking theories within Cambridge itself.30 Contrary to what is often argued, it was not continental scholars who did most to spread Newton’s ideas, but rather his colleagues and pupils from Cambridge.

25 J. Lambert, A Letter to the Author of an Observation on the Design of Establishing Annual Examinations at Cambridge (Cambridge, [1774]), p. 21. This pamphlet has sometimes also been attributed to Ann Jebb. 26 J. Brown, Puritan Preaching in England. A Study of Past and Present (London, 1900), p. 67. 27 Gascoigne, “Politics, Patronage and Newtonianism”, 8. 28 Ibid., 9. 29 G.A.J. Rogers, J.M. Vienne and Y.C. Zarka, The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics, and Religion (Dordrecht, 1997); S. Weyer, Die Cambridge Pla- tonists: Religion und Freiheit in England im 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). 30 Gascoigne, “Politics, Patronage and Newtonianism”, 2. 28 chapter one

Indeed, the university possessed a number of leading mathematical scholars in the eighteenth century quite apart from Newton: Roger Cotes, Rob- ert Smith and Edward Waring, to name but a few.31 In addition, several new professorships in the natural sciences were founded at Cambridge in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and important links were established with the recently founded Royal Society. Within a few years of the Principia being published, they came to form the heart of the Cambridge undergraduate syllabus. Indeed, the prominence of Newton and his work was undoubtedly one of the chief reasons why the Cam- bridge curriculum shifted so dramatically in the course of the eighteenth century in favour of mathematics and natural philosophy. Cambridge’s reform programme also benefitted from the fact that, in contrast with Oxford, it received a high degree of government favour in the years after the Glorious Revolution. Although both universities were, to some extent, the target of criticism as bastions of the clergy and anti- revolution sentiment,32 William III, with his goal of increasing the com- prehensiveness of the Anglican Church, was far more positively inclined to Cambridge than to Tory, high-church Oxford, which was notoriously Jacobite in sympathy.33 Indeed, he took active measures to increase the low-church, Whig character of the university. Most noticeably, he promoted latitudinarian churchmen from Cambridge such as John Tillotson and Thomas Tenison, who both became archbishops of Canterbury. This, in turn, allowed them to promote their own protégés within the university who did much to spread latitudinarian ideas among both junior and senior members. These were precisely the men who were to be favourable to the dissemination of Newton’s ideas within Cambridge. Newton shared their liberal religious views and they saw in his theories a powerful scientific justification for the existence of God and proof of his role in forming the universe—what came to be known as ‘the argument from design’. Indeed, they and their supporters helped to form what has often been termed a “Holy Alliance” between Anglicanism and Newtonian natural philosophy.34 As Beilby Porteus put it in a sermon before the university in

31 Gascoigne, “Maths and Meritocracy”, 566. 32 Gascoigne, “Church and State Allied: The Failure of Parliamentary Reform of the Universities, 1688–1800”, pp. 405–7. 33 Gascoigne, “Maths and Meritocracy”, 573–6. There were a few public expressions of Jacobite sentiment at Cambridge (and even occasional undergraduate rioting) in the early years of the eighteenth century, but nothing compared with that at Oxford. See Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746, p. 116. 34 Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment, pp. 2–3. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 29

1767, by revealing the “sublime discoveries of the Newtonian philosophy”, mathematics and natural philosophy encouraged students to accept and admire the divine order of the heavens and “their great Author, even the Father of Lights”.35 Moreover, it was precisely the latitudinarian dons who promoted New- tonian physics who were to be instrumental in introducing and developing the new examination system, proving once again the close connection between Cambridge’s peculiar intellectual and religious character and its championing of meritocratic reform.36 These were the protégés of Tillot- son and Tenison, in particular Richard Laughton, Richard Bentley and William Whiston. As a tutor at Clare College, Laughton became known for the encouragement he gave to his pupils to study the Principia, and when proctor in 1709/10 he worked hard to promote questions on Newto- nian mathematics in the university disputations. He was also one of the first officials to pay closer attention to the regulation in the Elizabethan statutes that BA candidates might be questioned by MAs after all other requirements for the degree had been fulfilled and, in so doing, to promote the development of the new examinations. As Gascoigne has argued, it is also likely that Laughton was responsible for the distinction introduced in 1710 between the first and second Tripos, which, in his words, constituted the “seed”, from which “the whole of the apparatus of classes of honours was to develop”.37 William Whiston, also a fellow of Clare, was the author of some of the earliest Newtonian textbooks to be used at Cambridge; he also put forward proposals for examination reform which aimed to place “Mathematics and Experimentation” at the heart of the syllabus.38 It was, however, Richard Bentley, as Master of Trinity, who did most to unite the two causes. In his own college, he had made examinations for fellowships and scholarships considerably more rigorous and promoted the study of Newtonian mathematics. It seems likely that Bentley’s experiments at Trinity in the early years of the century were crucial in ensuring that the university as a whole adopted similar techniques in the emerging Tripos

35 B. Porteus, A Sermon preached before the University of Cambridge (London, 1767), p. 15. 36 For the link between Newtonian Physics and the rise of competitive examination, see also Stray, “From Oral to Written Examinations: Oxford, Cambridge and Dublin 1700– 1914”, 76–130. 37 Gascoigne, “Maths and Meritocracy”, 574. 38 W. Whiston, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston (London, 1753), pp. 42–5, cited in Gascoigne, “Mathematics and Meritocracy”, 574. 30 chapter one examination. In Bentley’s own words, it was through the developments at Trinity that the whole youth of the University took a new spring of industry . . . Mathe- matics was brought to that height, that the questions disputed in the Schools were quite of another set than were ever heard there before.39 As a result of these changes to the syllabus and examination system, tensions between junior and senior members at Cambridge were rarely concerned with the question of university reform, in contrast with the situation at Oxford. Indeed, it is possible that by showing a willingness to countenance reform and the introduction of modern subjects (which became increasingly important to many students and their parents over the course of the eighteenth century), junior-senior relations, in general, were to be less strained than at Oxford. There is considerable evidence to suggest that many undergraduates took well to the promotion of Newto- nianism at Cambridge, particularly at Clare College, which soon gained a reputation for success in the field of natural philosophy.40 Within a very few years, the Senate House Examination came to be respected and valued by students and their colleges who put increasing weight on the results they achieved.41 More generally, students at Cambridge keen to see reform in a variety of areas (political, social and religious) outside the sphere of the university had reason to believe that at least a minority of senior members shared their general desire for change. With its latitudinarian reputation, and particularly in the years after the Glorious Revolution, Cambridge attracted a number of leading men who were already (or came later to be) committed non-conformists. Unsurprisingly perhaps, such men took a leading part in promoting syllabus and examination reform. John Jebb, a fellow of Peterhouse and co-author of a leading Newtonian textbook, is a good example.42 A man of committed Unitarian views, who associated with Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley, he publicly questioned the doctrine of the Trinity and the need for clergymen to subscribe the Thirty- Nine Articles. In 1772 he was instrumental in orchestrating the controversy about the need for undergraduates to subscribe the Articles at graduation.

39 The Correspondence of Richard Bentley Vol. II ed., C. Wordsworth, (London, 1842), pp. 448–9. 40 Gascoigne, “Politics, Patronage and Newtonianism”, 17. 41 Gascoigne, “Maths and Meritocracy”, 550. 42 For Jebb’s reputation as a radical, see A. Page, John Jebb and the Enlightenment Origins of British Radicalism (London, 2003). riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 31

Nor was Jebb alone;43 a majority of Cambridge senior members agreed that the current form of subscription was too restrictive and in 1772 voted to replace it with a general declaration of conformity to the Church of England.44 Such a thing would have been unthinkable in Oxford at this time. Likewise, Cambridge produced with striking frequency senior members who condoned or even actively supported the American and French Revolutions. Jebb, for one, confessed his admiration for the American colonists as early as 1774, declaring boldly that “Locke had shewn [him] who are the real rebels, in a contest of this kind.”45 The famous classical don, Richard Porson, was even a member of the London Corresponding Society.46 While such radicals as Jebb and Porson were not perhaps the norm, it is fair to say that Enlightenment thought, particularly the writings of Locke, whose Essay on Human Understanding (1690) had been banned by his own university, Oxford, in 1703, was popular at Cambridge and formed an important part of the undergraduate curriculum in the eighteenth century.47 Indeed, many Cambridge dons (including Newton himself) espoused Lockean notions of the social contract. Their emphasis on natural theology meant that they tended to support theories of government based on natural rights. As such, many, including Newton himself, were whole- heartedly in support of the Glorious Revolution as they felt that James II had forfeited his right to the throne by failing to observe the laws of the realm. Popery and arbitrary power were condemned together at Cam- bridge, and such attitudes no doubt played out well to an undergraduate body which was itself far from out of sympathy with the revolutionaries in France.48 There were several instances of junior members protesting

43 Other Unitarians prominent in the movement to reform the examination system at Cambridge in the eighteenth century were John Disney at Magdalene College and William Frend, a fellow of Jesus College. 44 V.H.H. Green, “Religion in the Colleges 1715–1800” in Sutherland and Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. V, p. 465. The specific date that the grace was passed was June 23 1772. For this see [V. Thomas], Extracts from a Collection of Papers Published in Oxford in 1772 on the Subject of Subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles Required from Young Persons at their Matriculation (Oxford, 1835), p. vii. 45 The Works Theological, Medical, Political and Miscellaneous, of John Jebb Vol. I, ed., J. Disney (London, 1787), p. 87. 46 Stray, “Politics, Culture and Scholarship: Classics in the Quarterly Review”, pp. 96, 105. 47 It was Charles Kidman, another well-known latitudinarian fellow at Corpus and pro- tégé of Tenison, who became known as the fist tutor to introduce his students to the ideas of Locke. 48 For Cambridge undergraduates influenced by revolutionary ideas from France, see Becher, “Radicals, Whigs and Conservatives”, 410–11. 32 chapter one explicitly in favour of the Jacobin cause. In the later 1790s, for example, a crowd of students gathered on Castle Hill in Cambridge to listen to the Duke of Bedford, who, dressed “in a Brutus crop, in contrast with the full- bottomed wigs of the Seniors, and powdered locks of the Undergraduates of the University, stood up above the crowd, and made a long and vehement harangue in favour of those revolutionary measures which he had come there to advocate”.49

Riots at Oxford and the Threat of a Royal Visitation, 1714–1748

The contrast with the attitudes of senior members at Oxford was certainly stark. They showed no willingness to reform the syllabus in response to scientific developments or Enlightenment thought. It has already been mentioned that Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1690) was banned by the Hebdomadal Board in 1703. The traditional picture of Oxford in this period is as a bastion of Jacobite sentiment, fairly well united in its support for the Stuarts; but we should rather think of a university riven by internal faction, particularly between old and young.50 It is telling that along with Whigs fighting Whigs and Tories fighting Tories, Nicholas Amhurst, writing in 1721, mentioned “masters against Doctors and Heads of Colleges” and “senior Fellows against junior Fellows”.51 His reference to Tories fighting Tories is also significant. As the eighteenth century wore on and undergraduate participation in Jacobite riots became more enthusiastic and violent, many senior members became increasingly troubled about what this meant for Oxford’s reputation with the new Hanover- ian king and his Whig ministers, particularly as they were already held in suspicion of being disloyal. On the day of the coronation, the authorities in Oxford had conferred a DCL on the notorious Jacobite, Sir Constantine Phipps, and in September 1715 elected Lord Arran, the brother of the Duke of Ormonde, as Chancellor when Cambridge, by contrast, had chosen the Prince of Wales. There were also a number of public sermons preached in

49 C. Carlyon, Early Years and Late Reflections Vol. III (London, 1856), pp. 50–1. 50 Such tension was visible not only between junior and senior members, but also within the body of senior members, between, for example, junior and senior MAs or the MAs as a whole and the heads of houses. 51 [N. Amhurst], Terrae-Filius (52 nos. London January–July 1721), no. viii (4–8 February 1721). riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 33 which George I’s policy towards the university had been openly criticized and the House of Stuart praised.52 When expressed in private, the majority of Oxford’s senior members were still prepared to condone, and many even endorsed, Jacobite views. However, when it became an issue of public disturbance bringing the whole university into disrepute, senior members tried hard to separate themselves from the actions of their pupils. Shortly after a particularly violent riot on 29 May 1715, in which a Presbyterian meeting house was destroyed, the event was condemned roundly by the heads of houses and blamed upon a small faction of Whig junior members, known as the Con- stitution Club. Senior members were beginning to appreciate the potential consequences of such disturbances, having seen a full regiment of infan- try garrisoned on the town since late 1715.53 The following year, however, on the Prince of Wales’s birthday, there were even worse disturbances in which Jacobite students clashed violently with the soldiers. At this point, the Vice-Chancellor, Bernard Gardiner pleaded that people should not entertain “a general ill Opinion of a Body of Men, from the behaviour of a few Strangers . . . and those perhaps Irregular or Designing Men: [n]or yet from the unguarded Sallies of Youth, namely the sudden Effects of Joy, Emulation or Humour, without any further premediated Views”.54 Gardiner had every right to be worried. The incident on the Prince of Wales’s birthday led to a full-scale investigation by the House of Lords which, perhaps unsurprisingly, found against the authorities in Oxford.55 From then on, the Whig party seemed determined to seize back control over the universities. In 1715, the secretary of state, Lord Townshend solicited a thorough-going proposal for a reform of both Oxford and Cambridge from Humphrey Prideaux, the Dean of Norwich and a former Student of Christ Church.56 In 1717, when Charles Spencer, Earl of Sun- derland, had replaced Townshend as northern secretary, he launched his own campaign for university reform. Although the bill was to include both

52 P. Langford, “Tories and Jacobites 1714–51” in Sutherland and Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. V, p. 103. 53 This action became notorious in Oxford-Cambridge rivalry in this period with numerous ditties composed comparing George I’s decision to send troops to Oxford with the gift of his extensive library to Cambridge around the same time. See G. Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time Vol. II (London, 1740), p. 569. 54 B. Gardiner, A Plain Relation of Some Late Passages at Oxford (Oxford, 1717), p. 1. 55 Langford, “Tories and Jacobites 1714–51”, p. 104. 56 Green, “Reformers and Reform in the University”, p. 607; for the proposal itself, see “Articles of Reformation for the Two Universities”, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. Oxon, e.125. 34 chapter one

Oxford and Cambridge, the preamble, composed by political allies, James Stanhope and Thomas Parker, makes clear that the riots at Oxford had been the main trigger behind the proposals. It was “notorious”, it declared, that large numbers of students had been “infected with principles of Sedition . . . that Riots and tumults have disturbed the Peace of your Uni- versities and affronted your Government and [that] the Offenders have been concealed or at least not detected and duly brought to Parliament”. “[T]here can be”, it continued, “no reasonable expectation of enjoying Peace and Tranquility for any long time if the Youth of the Nobility and Gentry and especially such as are designed for Holy Orders are infected with false Principles utterly inconsistent with our happy establishment in Church and State.”57 In order to correct these abuses, the bill proposed an extreme solution, to vest the nomination of all university and college posts in the crown. This was to include not merely the Chancellorship, Vice-Chancellorship, college headships and fellowships, but even undergraduate scholarships and exhibitions. In A Memorial Relating to the Universities, perhaps intended as an earlier draft of the same bill, Parker explained that the “disloyal behaviour” of Oxford “since his Majesty’s happy accession” had “brought on a necessity of finding out some effectual method of amending and regulating” the university, of bringing it “to a better sense of [its] duty to . . . king and country”.58 Nor was it simply from the government that such criticism came. The periodical and pamphlet press flowed at this time with works hostile to Oxford. Cambridge, by contrast, was much more lightly handled. Various scions of the Whig press also used such occasions to call for a royal visitation of Oxford to quash the spirit of rebellion which many felt to plague the university. In The State-Anatomy of Great Britain, published in 1717, the dissenting philosopher, John Toland, described Oxford as “the chief place of arms for the Pretender . . . the only garrison that stands out for him now”.59 “Why may not Oxford”, he asked, “. . . be reform’d or purg’d by a ROYAL VISITATION tomorrow, as [it] was at the Reformation . . . if upon a due examination it sh’d be found, that a proud, Popish, fierce and unsociable spirit, a spirit of narrowness, party, consciousness, and bigotry,

57 B. Williams, Stanhope: A Study in Eighteenth-Century War and Diplomacy (Oxford, 1932), pp. 456–7. 58 T. Parker, A Memorial Relating to the Universities (1717), cited in G. Roberson and J.R. Green, Oxford During The Last Century (Oxford, 1859) pp. 19–20. 59 J. Toland, The State-Anatomy of Great Britain (London, 1717), p. 52. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 35 has prevail’d there, ever since the Reformation . . .?”60 For him, Cambridge was a very different case and should be left alone, it being “a hundred times less guilty than Oxford”.61 In his 1717 Account of the University of Cambridge, Edmond Miller made a similar distinction; although deeply critical of many features of Cambridge life, Oxford was by far the guiltier of the two.62 A dissenting pamphlet which also appeared in 1717 urged similar government intervention with an especial focus on Oxford given its particular enthusiasm for the Jacobite cause. “The Tutors are in many Colleges negligent of the Morals of their Pupils”, it complained, “and only careful to instill disloyal Principles into them. Under such Tutors the Youth have grown up to a degree of Wickedness past Recovery.”63 As it was, the bill was thrown out when it finally came before parliament in late 1719, having become associated with a far more ambitious attempt at Whig reform by the Earl of Sunderland—his unsuccessful peerage bill.64 However, the moment marked an important change in junior- senior relations at Oxford. Having seen the potential consequences of flagrant disloyalty to the new regime, the university authorities began to take important steps to curb the behaviour of undergraduates and bachelors, which led in turn to greater and more public conflict between junior and senior members. As Paul Langford has perceptively remarked, “a tendency, particularly on the part of those in authority, to avoid any kind of extremism . . . was in many ways to be the most marked feature of Oxford politics during the reigns of George I and George II”. In particular, senior members were concerned to give the government no further grounds to push for a royal visitation. “In this respect”, Langford continued,

60 Toland, The State-Anatomy of Great Britain, p. 71. 61 Ibid., 73. It ought to be pointed out that John Toland, who had been working on an Irish dictionary at the Bodleian Library, was himself ordered out of Oxford by the Vice- Chancellor in the final years of the seventeenth century on account of his religious beliefs and therefore cannot be seen as unbiased in his opinion of the university. 62 E. Miller, An Account of the University of Cambridge, and the Colleges There (London, 1717). 63 Reasons for Visiting the Universities (1717), p. 33, cited in T. Lewis, The Danger of the Church-Establishment of England, from the Insolence of Protestant Dissenters (London, 1718), p. 47. Another pamphlet urging a visitation of the universities at this time was Reasons for a Royal Visitation, Occasion’d by the Present Great Defection of the Clergy from the Govern- ment (London, 1717). 64 Gascoigne, “Church and State Allied: The Failure of Parliamentary Reform of the Universities, 1688–1800”, p. 415. The peerage bill would have ensured a permanent Whig majority in the House of Lords but was rejected by 269 votes to 177. 36 chapter one

the most important conflict within the university was not that between Whig and Tory but that between the relatively moderate authorities in the centre and the extremes at either end of the political spectrum. To a great extent this was the ancient conflict between junior and senior, between the larger forces of the MAs and the controlling groups at the hub of university affairs.65 Nor was the importance of junior-senior conflict at this time lost upon contemporaries. It was not Whig or Tory juniors that the authorities feared, but a combination of both, particularly the effect they were seen to have on each other. As Thomas Hearne put it, what senior members really dreaded were the “Jacobites and Whiggs joyn’d together to do the University a Mischief”, not necessarily in fighting for the same cause, but in provoking each other to open rebellion which only brought more suspicion on the university and the threat of parliamentary intervention closer.66 In the years after 1715, the authorities pursued and punished Whig and Tory troublemakers. However, although individual Whigs were apprehended, such as Richard Meadowcourt, a junior fellow of Merton, who took a leading role in the riots of 1716, the majority punished were inevitably of extreme Tory and Jacobite persuasion.67 One of the most important flash-points of tension between senior members and Jacobite juniors was the contested parliamentary election of 1722. In the two previous elections since the death of Queen Anne, there had been little trouble and moderate Tory MPs had been returned. However, when the notorious Jacobite Principal of St Mary Hall, William King, went against the advice of his fellow heads and challenged one of the moderate incumbents, George Clarke, fear of an open conflict between juniors and seniors became tangible. Writing in late 1721, George Carter, Provost of Oriel, described the stand-off. King, he wrote “is lookt upon by . . . the young and violent party here to be a much better Tory than George Clark; but . . . [e]very Head as far as I can find is against him”.68 Although, as it happened, the outcome of the election was clear (with King winning only a small number of votes) the fear of wide-scale junior rioting had been serious. “The University electors will become Mobbish and Popular”, fret- ted one senior member in a letter dated 24 December 1721. “If once the

65 Langford, “Tories and Jacobites 1714–51”, p. 110. 66 Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne Vol. V ed., D.W. Rannie, (Oxfordshire Historical Society, 1901), p. 168. 67 Langford, “Tories and Jacobites, 1714–51”, p. 112. 68 G. Carter to Wake, (26 November 1721), cited in Langford, “Tories and Jacobites 1714–51”, p. 113. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 37

Younger and Unthinking part of the University meet with success against their governors, they, like a furious horse, will too soon feel their own strength and throw off all submission and consequently Opposition and Rebellion will be their first principle.”69 The determination of the university authorities to crush support for King among junior members and young MAs had been total. As Sedgwick Harrison, Camden Professor of History, reported of what he styled the conflict between the “young” and “serious” parts of the university, “the Heads of Houses ha[d] nothing so much at heart as to defeat the power of the Masters”.70 While the 1730s were to prove relatively quiet, with the university authorities determined to crush expressions of junior discontent and keep Oxford out of the public eye, the 1740s and 50s witnessed tensions worse even than those seen in the years after the accession of George I. Every year following the defeat of the rebellion of 1745, there were riotous scenes in which drunken undergraduates repeatedly toasted the Pretender’s health. On the third anniversary, in the midst of a particularly violent clash, two undergraduates, James Dawes and John Whitmore, openly declared for the Pretender and combined this with flagrant disrespect of the university authorities. Dawes accosted the proctor attempting to remove him from the scene with the bold words: “I am the man that dare say God bless King James the 3d and tell you my Name is Dawes of St Mary Hall. I am a man of an Independent Fortune and therefore am afraid of . . . no one.”71 Dawes and Whitmore were punished seriously by the Vice-Chancellor, who prevented them from taking their degrees for a year, and received substantial penalties within their own colleges. However, the event was made the subject of official complaint to parliament by Richard Blacow, a young Whig MA from Brasenose College, and when the undergraduates repeated their riotous behaviour in October 1748, the government felt compelled to intervene directly. Dawes and Whitmore were indicted before King’s Bench and sentenced to two years in prison and a hefty fine.72 Relations between junior and senior members were thus tested anew. As the Master of Balliol, Theophilus Leigh, declared, in a letter to Sir John Dolben, the undergraduates seemed once again filled with “a Restless spirit

69 Weekly Journal, 24 December 1721, cited in A.D. Godley, Oxford in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1908), pp. 249–50. 70 S. Harrison, An Account of the Late Election for the University of Oxford (London, 1722), p. 53. 71 Ward, Georgian Oxford, p. 170; see also P. Toynbee, “Horace Walpole’s Delenda est Oxonia”, English Historical Review 42:165 (January 1927), 95–108. 72 Ward, Georgian Oxford, p. 170. 38 chapter one disrelishing Subordination and Government.”73 Such fears received a dramatic confirmation when William King’s provocative Jacobite speech at the opening of the Radcliffe Camera in April 1749 received enthusiastic support from junior members. In a satirical poem of 1750, The Old Lady in her Tantarums, John Burton, fellow and tutor of Corpus Christi, depicted the effect of King’s speech and the growing inability of senior members to control undergraduate behaviour. “What is the Meaning”, he had “Mother Oxford” ask King, that you are always disturbing and breaking upon the Quiet of me and my Family? . . . What is that Same Thing which you are continually trumpeting in the Ears of my Boys, which you call Liberty! . . . I am sore afraid ‘twill noose the poor Lads, ‘till like Wood Cocks they are caught in a Springe . . . Under your great Umbrage what desperate Renegados shall we have, if my Boys (for I am afraid they be not the sharpest in the world) should be Fools enough to hearken to you.74 Growing unrest at Oxford reignited government interest in a royal visitation, precisely what many senior members had been afraid of.75 Most active in pressing for a Commission of Enquiry were Lord Hardwicke, Lord Gower, the Duke of Bedford and the Duke of Newcastle.76 As early as January 1749, Newcastle, then Chancellor of Cambridge, had decided upon a fresh campaign to forcibly take control of Oxford’s affairs. He proposed a grand visitation to investigate and curb the riotous behaviour of Oxford students. It was once again proposed that all university posts including that of Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor should henceforth rest with the crown.77 This time, the threat was directed even more clearly against Oxford. Writing to Thomas Sherlock, Bishop of London, at this time, Newcastle was very clear on this point: “Any general academical Rules” proposed by the government, “may possibly comprehend both Uni- versities”, he stated, “but I can never admit, That if the late and notorious, Conduct of the University of Oxford, should make a Visitation or Enquiry

73 T. Leigh to J. Dolben (6 March and 6 April 1752), Northants. Records Office. Dolben MSS D (F) 87, D (F) 82. 74 [J. Burton], The Old Lady in her Tantarums: or Mother Oxford Ranting at her Eldest son K—ng (Eton, 1750), pp. 6, 11–12. 75 It should be mentioned that there were a few Oxford dons, for example, Richard Newton, the founder of Hertford College, who were in favour of government intervention as long as any Commission or Visitation was carried out with the advice and support of the university. See [R. Newton], A Series of Papers on Subjects the Most Interesting to the Nation in General and Oxford in Particular (London, 1750), p. 16. 76 Ward, Georgian Oxford, p. 175. 77 Ibid., 175. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 39 there advisable, That will be any Reason for the same at Cambridge whose Behaviour is as meritorious, as the other is justly to be censured.”78 Some historians have interpreted the fact that plans for a Commission of Enquiry were ultimately dropped as proving the desire of the government to intervene in university affairs had declined significantly since the early years of the century.79 However, there is strong evidence to suggest that the renewed interest in government interference was taken seriously by both members of parliament and the authorities at Oxford. Horace Walpole, for one, considered the likelihood of a visitation such that he wrote a long and emotional defence of Oxford’s behaviour in 1749. The title of this anonymous pamphlet, Delenda est Oxonia, gives a clear idea of how serious Walpole felt the repercussions might be for the university. In it, he accused the ministry of an irrational fear of student revolt which was causing them to adopt an even more heavy-handed approach than had been taken in the years immediately following the accession of George I.80 Although stating incorrectly that the proposal to divest the university of its right to nominate its Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor and other posts was new,81 Walpole had clearly struck a nerve with his claim that government fears had increased substantially in recent years. The pamphlet never reached its intended audience but was seized at the printer’s before it could be published.82

Reaction at Oxford and ‘Reform’ of the Syllabus

The authorities at Oxford certainly took the renewed threat of a visitation seriously. Fear of government interference remained sufficiently high in the years following the riots of 1714–1717 for a number of colleges to take active steps to increase their control over junior members. Historians

78 British Library, Add. MS 33,061, fo. 31. 79 See, for example, Gascoigne, “Church and State Allied: The Failure of Parliamentary Reform of the Universities, 1688–1800”, p. 418. He argues that government interest in a Visitation in the wake of student riots following the rebellion of 1745 was nothing but a temporary deviation from this overarching trend. After the alienation of the first few years, he suggests that the eighteenth century witnessed a significant rapprochement between church and state, which was, in part, exemplified by the declining government interest in ‘reforming’ the universities. 80 Horace Walpole, Delenda est Oxonia, quoted in Toynbee, “Horace Walpole’s Delenda est Oxonia”, 105–6. 81 Ibid., 106. 82 Ibid., 95. 40 chapter one have often remarked upon the growing frequency of complaints about the narrow, ‘school-boy’ nature of Oxford’s curriculum in the first half of the eighteenth century.83 Writing in 1721, Nicholas Amhurst, expelled from St John’s in 1719 for his part in the riots, condemned the tiny amount of preparation necessary for success in the BA examination. “Many a school- boy”, he claimed, “has done more . . . for his breaking-up task!”84 Edward Gibbon’s reflection that he had remained “unprovided with original learning” and “unformed in the habits of thinking” during his time at Magdalen suggests the situation had altered little by mid-century.85 Such complaints have usually been accepted as evidence of the low state of learning in eighteenth-century Oxford when compared with rival institutions such as the Scottish universities or dissenting academies.86 It is more likely, however, that they reflect a deliberate attempt by senior members, in a number of colleges, to restrict the content of the traditional syllabus in an effort to control the moral and political ideas to which undergraduates were exposed. It is not simply that colleges chose to retain the narrow curriculum of classical studies, inherited from the seventeenth-century Laudian statutes;87 in many cases, we see an actual retrenchment, a move towards an even heavier reliance on particular writers which senior members felt would imbue correct moral and political principles and discour- age independent reflection. Although the Christ Church collections books should not necessarily be seen as representative of the situation at other colleges, it was, at this time, the university’s largest college and set the tone for developments elsewhere. After the riots of 1714–1717, the collections books reveal a move

83 See, for example, Stone, “The Size and Composition of the Oxford Student Body 1580–1909”, pp. 48–9. 84 [N. Amhurst], Terrae-Filius: or, the Secret History of the University of Oxford Vol. II, 2nd edition (London, 1726), p. 67. 85 E. Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon (Dublin, 1796), p. 26. 86 See, for example, K. Haugen, “Imagined Universities: Public Insult and the Terrae Filius in Early Modern Oxford” in A. Goldgar and R.I. Frost (eds.), Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society (Leiden, 2004), pp. 342–3. It should be noted however that Dame Lucy Sutherland called for a revision of the overwhelmingly negative image of eighteenth- century Oxford presented in the historiography as long ago as 1973. See L.S. Sutherland, The University of Oxford in the Eighteenth Century: A Reconsideration (Oxford, 1973), 15. 87 L.S. Sutherland, “The Curriculum” in Sutherland and Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. V, p. 472. The Statutes prescribed, above all, the grammatical study of “selected heads out of the Greek and Roman Antiquities”, the staple diet to be had at any good public school. In addition, rhetoric was to be taught; and once more the key texts (Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian and Hermogenes) would have been largely familiar from school. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 41 to standardize the texts which undergraduates read and to increase the frequency and depth with which senior members were able to test student reading. Instead of drawing up reading lists (either termly or yearly) for individual students, standard lists, frequently containing the same texts, were compiled for whole year groups to read and be examined on.88 For the period between 1717 and 1750, M.L. Clarke has concluded that at Christ Church “the prescribed books remained unchanged and were common to all undergraduates, the range of reading was very narrow” and many books on the list, such as the Aeneid and the Iliad, “are likely to have been already familiar . . . from school reading”.89 From the limited evidence we have, we can see that Christ Church was not alone. In the statutes of Hertford College, written by its founder and first Principal, Richard Newton, in 1739, it is possible to see the influence of the changes which had been taking place at Christ Church where Newton himself had been a tutor in the last years of the seventeenth and first years of the eighteenth century. At Hertford, control over student reading was placed firmly in the hands of the college’s senior members. The tutors, who, together with the other fellows, were to be selected by the Principal alone, were to choose four classical authors for each class of undergraduates on which they would be examined weekly by their tutors and once a year by the Principal himself. That these ‘collections’ were to have a disciplinary as well as an educa- tive function is clear when Newton wrote that students should take careful note in the course of their reading “of such Characters of Persons, or Descriptions of Actions as he thinks worthy of Imitation”.90 At Oriel, likewise, the prescription of the works of ancient historians seems to have been a deliberate policy designed to quell the spirit of insubordination seen in the riots following the defeat of the 1745 rebellion. This move was particularly associated with one of the college’s tutors, Edward Bentham, who published in 1748 what he described as an “Antidote for the Use of his Pupils, whenever an Attempt should be made to tamper with their Principles, and withdraw them from their Obedience to the Laws of the Land”. “[I]f you find in yourself so strong a Turn for Politicks”, he wrote,

88 Sutherland, “The Curriculum”, p. 476. 89 M.L. Clarke, “Classical Studies” in ed. Sutherland and Mitchell, The History of the University of Oxford Vol. V, p. 523. 90 R. Newton, Rules and Statutes . . . for the Government of a College Intended to be Incor- porated by the Name . . . Hertford College (London, 1739), p. 9. 42 chapter one

. . . those of Greece or Rome might yet a while afford sufficient scope for your Diligence and Curiosity. For when young Persons, before they have sufficiently formed their Judgment by these and the like Models . . . enter too deeply into the Consideration of our National Concern, the wretched Spirit of Party-Zeal seldom fails to enflame their Imaginations and betray them into various Extravagancies.91 A careful perusal of the ancient historians, he wrote, would teach a would- be rebel, ’Tis your Duty to reverence Authority in whatever Hands you find it placed, to avoid giving Offence to it, and to recommend yourself to its esteem and Regard by improving your Mind in useful Learning, and fitting yourself to do your Duty in that State unto which you may be called hereafter.92 It is also clear from Bentham’s pamphlet how closely this policy of advocating the reading of particular historians was linked to renewed fears of a royal visitation. “Moderate your zeal”, he urged his pupils, and do not suffer it to expose the University to the Resentment of those higher Powers, who will be naturally led to censure it as having been deficient in the Exer- cise of some material Act of Instruction of Discipline; as either permitting or conniving at a direct Insult upon that Government on which the very Being of the University depends.93 With precisely this fear in mind, he penned a sequel, entitled A Letter to a Fellow of a College, in which he urged other senior members to take measures to improve discipline and increase their control over the students in their own colleges. “The Nation hath taken the Alarm”, he cautioned, “and therefore the Season calls loudly upon us to examine, what hath been the real Ground of general Obloquy against us, in order to remove it for the future.”94 Although we have less evidence about the specific rules which other colleges introduced to ensure greater oversight of student reading, it is clear that, in general, the tasks allotted, particularly with regard to the handling of classical texts, bore a close resemblance to those already familiar from school. The two most common assignments were construing (or the word-for-word translation) of classical texts and composition (both verse and prose), mostly in Latin. Construing had been envisaged as an

91 E. Bentham, A Letter to a Young Gentleman of Oxford (Oxford, 1748), p. 5. 92 Ibid., 6. 93 Ibid., 10. 94 E. Bentham, A Letter to a Fellow of a College (London, 1749), p. 51. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 43 important part of the examination for the BA degree in the Laudian statutes and continued to play a leading role in eighteenth-century Oxford, constituting the staple activity of college lectures.95 Although a wide variety of texts were read including works dealing with potentially controversial issues such as democracy and popular rebellion (for example, in the works of Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon), all texts were read in the same way: for the purpose of illuminating grammatical rules and problems. Such college teaching was certainly not designed to encourage critical thought about the causes of historical events or to debate contentious questions of politics or morality. The ancient history lectures by the Camden Professor which undergraduates were obliged to attend seem to have been similarly unreflective. The statutes required him to lecture, in particular, on a compendium of ancient history which had for many years been a popular school textbook, Florus’s Epitome of Roman History.96 Political and moral philosophy, along with questions of geography and chronology, were strictly reserved for MA students according to the Laudian statutes. Although public ‘disputations’ (usually taking place in the college hall and nominally before the head of house) formed an important part of the undergraduate curriculum, students rarely engaged in anything like real debate. Declamations were usually read on issues of commonplace morality.97 Divinity, the other main subject in the undergraduate syllabus, was approached in a similar way, with students reading carefully selected, non-controversial material, usually taken from the Greek New Testa- ment and a few approved commentaries. As with the selection of classical texts, it is possible to detect shifts of policy in the kind of divinity instruction provided in response to fears about the susceptibility of undergraduates to radical ideas. In the late 1720s senior members became increasingly worried about the popularity of deism, particularly among students at Cambridge.98 Following a prominent case in which a young

95 Clarke, “Classical Studies”, p. 517. 96 Ward and Heywood (eds.), Statutes Vol. I, p. 23. 97 Clarke provides examples of non-controversial topics declaimed upon by Edward Bentham when he was an undergraduate in “Classical Studies”, pp. 518–9. The examples he gives are on the themes of Sperne voluptates, nocet empta dolore voluptas and Numquam minus solus quam cum solus. 98 The condemning of deism and of prominent Cambridge thinkers associated with the school such as William Whiston became an increasingly important feature of university sermons at Oxford in the first half of the eighteenth century. See Green, “Religion in the Colleges, 1715–1800”, pp. 437–8. 44 chapter one regent master of Trinity College, Oxford, Nicholas Stevens, was exposed as a promoter of deistic ideas, the Vice-Chancellor, Edward Butler, called an emergency meeting of the Hebdomadal Board. He solicited support for publishing a Programma designed “to guard the Youth of this Place” against those “Wicked Advocates for Pretended Humane Reason against Divine Revelation” who sought to corrupt the “Unguarded Inexperience of less inform’d Minds”. Sent out to all tutors, it urged them to ensure the careful instruction of their pupils in the Thirty-Nine Articles together with a “frequent and careful Reading [of] the Scriptures and such other Books as may serve more effectively to promote Christianity, Sound Principles and Orthodox Faith”.99 Following the Vice-Chancellor’s plea, the rigour of divinity instruction provided seems to have increased in a number of colleges. At Queen’s, for instance, the Provost, Joseph Smith, decided that from Michaelmas term 1731, all taberdars must answer questions on divinity not simply on Sundays but on all holy days in the year (with the exception of Christmas). The questions, moreover, were to be compiled by the Provost himself and each student was obliged to show his preparations for answering them to the Dean (and the Provost if required) once every three months.100 The measures taken at a college level to tighten up the traditional curriculum, particularly after the riots of 1748, may be linked to the growing popularity of a set of ideas which came to be known as Hutchinsonian- ism. Associated with the natural philosopher, John Hutchinson, these ideas have generally been analysed as a conservative high-church critique of Newtonian philosophy and the deistic notion of God which it helped to promote.101 While a number of studies have remarked upon the esteem in which Hutchinson’s works were held at Oxford in the 1750s, this has not usually been connected with the rising levels of generational tension at the university in this period.102 However, it is likely no coinci-

99 Programma (2nd December 1728), copy in Bodleian G.A. Oxon. B.111, fo. 39. 100 Queen’s College Library, MS 475, fo. 93. 101 The Philosophical and Theological Works of J.H., R. Spearman and J. Bate (eds.), 12 vols. (1748–9). 102 See, for example, J.C. English, “John Hutchinson’s Critique of Newtonian Hetero- doxy”, Church History, 68 (1999), 581–97; C.B. Wilde, “Hutchinsonianism, Natural Philoso- phy and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth-Century Britain”, History of Science, 18 (1980), 1–24; D.S. Katz, “The Hutchinsonians and Hebraic Fundamentalism in Eighteenth-Century England” in D.S. Katz and J.I. Israel (eds.), Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews (Leiden, 1990), pp. 237–55; A.J. Kuhn, “Glory or Gravity: Hutchinson vs. Newton”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (1961), 303–22; B.W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998), pp. 137–146. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 45 dence that the appeal of Hutchinsonianism was greatest at Oxford in the difficult years around mid-century when the university was threatened with a royal visitation. Although Hutchinson himself was closely associated with neither Oxford nor Cambridge, his ideas became symbolic of a wider cultural and ideological struggle between the two universities. It was not merely the fact that Newton had been professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, nor that, by the early eighteenth century, his theories had been largely adopted into the university curriculum; for Hutchinson’s supporters at Oxford, the popularity of Newtonian philosophy at Cambridge stood for a much more fundamental difference in ethos between the two universities. For them, Cambridge had come to symbolize disorder, being seen as the natural home of Whigs, Latitudinarians, even non-conformists and political radicals. While Hutchinson himself had been concerned chiefly with philological and theological questions in his controversy with Newton, those dons who became his intellectual disciples in the 1730s and 1740s were far more concerned with the threat posed by Newtonian philosophy and indeed Cambridge, more broadly, to established authority within their own university. George Watson was one of the first dons to associate himself publicly with the writings of Hutchinson. In a pamphlet entitled A Seasonable Admonition to the Church of England, published in 1755, Watson likened the supporters of Newtonianism and deism at Cambridge to the factious puritans who had fought against Charles I in the Civil War.103 They “despised Dominion”, he wrote, citing the Second Epistle of St Peter, “and were not afraid to speak evil of Dignities”.104 They established “a general Plan of Independency, wherein their Enthusiasm and Ambition might safely riot at the expence of the Public, without the least Check or Controul from any lawful Authority”.105 Towards the end of the pamphlet, he focused specifically on the danger posed to Oxford and the need to preserve it from the sins of pride and rebellion. “Our chief Dependence (under God)”, he wrote, “must be upon Places of Education, and may the divine Spirit ingrave it in the Memories of all who are intrusted with it in this Place!” In particular, he called for a more comprehensive instruction in basic divinity—the Greek New Testament and the Thirty-Nine Articles. “More

103 Cambridge, of course, was also the university that had welcomed the parliamentary forces in the 1640s. 104 2 Peter 2: 10, cited in G. Watson, A Seasonable Admonition to the Church of England (Oxford, 1755), p. 18. 105 Watson, A Seasonable Admonition to the Church of England, p. 18. 46 chapter one than ordinary Care should now be taken with the rising Generation”, he urged, “to warm their Hearts betimes with a deep and grateful Sense of God’s Mercies, and enrich their Understandings with the all-sufficient Knowledge of his Word.”106 In a negative sense, this involved a sustained disavowal of the educational value of Newtonian physics which George Horne, a prominent Hutchinsonian and later President of Magdalen, referred to as “physical knowledge” and “researches of nature.”107 In a 1753 pamphlet attacking the supporters of Newton, particularly those based at Cambridge, Horne argued that students “fond of giving a loose to a strong and lively imagination” might well be turned into “atheists” through a misreading of Newton’s writings.108 Knowledge of the bible, by contrast was certain and secure, girded by “the collateral evidence of all antiquity.”109 “[W]hoever attempts to guess at causes”, he wrote, “(for it can be called nothing better than guessing) merely from the superficies and appearance of things . . . will run into many strange and fatal mistakes.”110 What this tended to mean in practice was that Hutchinsonian clergymen at Oxford recommended sticking rigorously to the traditional curriculum of classical studies and divinity. They seem to have favoured precisely those texts which had been prescribed at Christ Church and other colleges in the early and mid-eighteenth century. As Horne declared in a pamphlet of 1756, “languages, history [and] antiquity” must be studied with “a view to make them handmaids to divine knowledge”.111 He linked this policy clearly with the need to improve respect for established authority among the undergraduate population. Addressing the students directly (“my younger Brethren of the University”), he urged them to “continu[e] steadfast and immovable, in the stations allotted” them, “living in due subordination and humble obedience to your tutors and governors in this place”.112 The hostility of the Hutchinsonians towards modern learning is confirmed by their opponents. Benjamin Kennicott, one of the few

106 Watson, A Seasonable Admonition to the Church of England, p. 25. 107 G. Horne, A Fair, Candid, and Impartial State of the Case between Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1753), pp. 1–2. 108 Ibid., 46. 109 Ibid., 75. 110 Horne, A Fair, Candid, and Impartial State of the Case between Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Hutchinson, p. 10. 111 G. Horne, An Apology for Certain Gentlemen in the University of Oxford, Aspersed in a late Anonymous Pamphlet (Oxford, 1756), p. 20. 112 Ibid., 63. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 47 committed Whigs at Oxford in the 1750s, accused them of “decrying human learning and the light of Reason”.113 They had no business, he wrote, styling themselves “public Reformers in Learning” when the only learning they promoted was conservative divinity and old-fashioned, school-boy classics.114 Expressing concern at how the “Governors” of the University had approved their ideas and “done them honour”, he stressed his determination to counter their attempt to win over junior members.115 I will “strive to prevent”, he wrote, “their making proselytes amongst the young and injudicious”.116 There is little doubt that the championing of the traditional syllabus by Hutchinsonians was intended primarily to challenge the growing popularity of modern learning, especially Newtonian philosophy; however, it is likely also to have been designed to prevent William King and others from using classical texts to justify student rebellion in the Jacobite cause. In the poem by John Burton discussed above, the university authorities (in the figure of ‘Mother Oxford’) are shown berating King for encouraging his undergraduate audience to see him as a latter-day Cicero: You! a meer Novice in Learning; an Upstart, a mere Mushroom, whose Name was scarce ever mentioned ‘till lately! . . . Thou art no Orator fit for Athens or Rome . . . don’t think yourself a Tully, or that thou art Master of any true old Eloquence in writing Latin, but sit content with being thought Learned among the ignorant, an Orator by the Seditious, and a Latin Scholar by Those who can speak nothing but English.117 That undergraduates were indeed celebrating King in this way is clear from a now-famous poem, The Triumph of Isis, published in 1749 by Thomas Warton the Younger, then a student at Trinity College. Written in response to an attack on the disloyalty of Oxford undergraduates by a Cambridge bachelor, William Mason,118 Warton employed the full pano- ply of classical authors, traditionally studied at Oxford, to defend King and his Jacobite sympathies. Although praised by a minority of senior members, including George Huddesford, the President of Trinity, who had first

113 B. Kennicott, A Word to the Hutchinsonians: or Remarks on Three Extraordinary Sermons lately Preached before the University of Oxford (London, 1756), p. 4. 114 Ibid., 7. 115 Ibid., 6. 116 Kennicott, A Word to the Hutchinsonians, p. 6. 117 Ibid., 14–15. 118 W. Mason, Isis. An Elegy (London, 1749). See, for example, p. 14, where he refers to “crouds” of undergraduates who “Blast the fair face of day; and madly bold/To Freedom’s foes infernal orgies hold.” 48 chapter one suggested the composition to Warton,119 the poem which likened King to Cicero and Cato and his Jacobitism to the patriotism of old Rome was of precisely the sort to concern those actively seeking to avoid a royal visitation: See on yon sage how all attentive stand, To catch his darting eye, and waving hand. Hark! he begins with all a TULLY’s art To pour the dictates of a CATO’s heart. Skill’d to pronounce what noblest thoughts inspire, He blends the Speaker’s with the Patriot’s Fire Bold to conceive, nor timorous to conceal, What Britons dare to think, he dares to tell.120

Religious Dissent and the Impact of the American Revolution

Despite the fact that Oxford was fairly quiet in the 1760s, with the accession of George III witnessing a significant rapprochement between the university authorities and the government, the spectre of generational conflict did not abate. The tensions which came to a head in the years following the rebellion of 1745 remained acute in the second half of the century. While the threat of Jacobitism receded, fears about the potential influence of non-conformist ideology and political radicalism developed to take its place. In the 1760s, suspicion centred on the perceived influence of John and Charles Wesley and their Methodist associates. The so- called ‘Holy Club’ succeeded in establishing small groups of supporters in no less than nine colleges including some of the larger societies like Christ Church.121 The expulsion of six undergraduates from St Edmund Hall in 1768 for allegedly attending Methodist meetings in the town was a sign of just how nervous the university authorities had become. At the centre of this was once more the association between religious heterodoxy and

119 D. Fairer, “Oxford and the Literary World” in Sutherland and Mitchell (eds.), The His- tory of the University of Oxford Vol. V, p. 791. Along with King at St Mary Hall, Huddesford was one of the most notorious Jacobite heads of houses in the middle years of the century. As Vice-Chancellor in 1754, he used an official speech to pronounce an angry condemna- tion of the support shown by the fellows of Exeter College to Whig voters in the county election of that year. See G. Huddesford, A Proper Reply to a Pamphlet, Entitled, A Defence of the Rector and Fellows of Exeter College (Oxford, 1755). 120 T. Warton, The Triumph of Isis (London, [1749]), p. 9. 121 In all, Christ Church, Lincoln, Queen’s, Brasenose, Merton, Corpus Christi, Magdalen, Pembroke and Exeter. See Green, “Religion in the Colleges, 1715–1800”, p. 442. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 49 a proud desire to rebel against established authority. As Samuel Johnson remarked of the forced removal of the St Edmund Hall students, “That expulsion was extremely just and proper. What have they to do at an Uni- versity who are not willing to be taught, but will presume to teach?”122 Cambridge was once more to play a leading role in the fears of senior members at Oxford. For many, it remained at the heart of the dissenter problem. It was even said that certain tutors there used their influence with students to corrupt their religious and social principles by encouraging a proud and rebellious attitude. For those at Oxford, a key proof of this was the support which Cambridge dons offered to the attempt by a number of MPs to relax the rules requiring subscription to the Thirty- Nine Articles at both universities. Oxford had always been stricter in this respect, obliging undergraduates to subscribe not only at graduation (which Cambridge also required) but also at matriculation. Although the bill to remove subscription was actually brought by a graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, Sir William Meredith, it had, as we saw earlier, been liberal Cambridge divines who had campaigned for an end to compulsory subscription since the mid 1760s. Although most historians have viewed the Hutchinsonians as a more or less spent force by the late 1760s, they were at the forefront of Oxford’s opposition to the proposal to remove subscription. Both Thomas Patten and George Horne wrote emotional letters to the Chancellor of the university, Lord North, urging him to take vigorous action to defend the status quo. Underlying both letters was a fear that to loosen the rules surrounding subscription would be to provoke even greater disrespect among undergraduates and worsen existing levels of generational tension. George Horne voiced his concern that “Deists and reprobates” might gain influence at Oxford and railed against the ideas put forward by the Cam- bridge divines at the Feathers Tavern which he saw as calling for a remod- elling of the church and universities along the lines of a Lockean social contract.123 Thomas Patten was likewise anxious lest a decision to replace subscription with a general declaration of conformity produce a rebellious attitude among Oxford undergraduates comparable with that he believed to prevail at Cambridge. “Should . . . this spirit of cavilling at the established doctrines of the Church of England”, he wrote, “become epidemical

122 J. Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London, 1791), p. 171. 123 G. Horne, Considerations on the Projected Reformation of the Church of England. In a Letter to the Right Honourable Lord North (London, 1772), pp. 18–19. 50 chapter one amongst our youth, should it become fashionable with them to think every thing wrong which their graver predecessors established as right and scriptural, how could such a spirit be checked and controlled?”124 Yet it was the close links perceived between dissenters in England and those fomenting rebellion in the American colonies which led to renewed attempts by college authorities to increase control over student reading. Although there have been several studies examining the fears produced by the American Revolution within the Anglican clergy at large,125 little attention has been paid to the reaction at the universities themselves. This is surprising given that it was the radicals’ ability to influence young men training for the church which many clergymen found particularly worrying. An examination of university sermons, for example, reveals deep fears about the likely effects of revolutionary ideas infecting the Oxford undergraduate body; here, once again, Hutchinsonians such as George Horne were particularly prominent. In a university sermon of 1781, he condemned the dissemination of “licentious tenets” which were producing a generation of undergraduates characterized by “an impatience of all law and restraint, discontents, divisions . . . ready at every opportunity to break forth into tumult and confusion”.126 Such fears were also shared by a wide range of Oxford’s senior members. Myles Cooper, for example, a fellow and former chaplain of Queen’s College, took every opportunity to argue that students were particularly vulnerable to revolutionary ideas. He had worked for a number of years as a professor at the Anglican King’s College in New York and had witnessed many students from colleges including his own take up the rebels’ cause. The image of generational revolt was a recurring theme in his sermons where he often referred to the revolutionaries as “petulant and rebellious children”.127 In one sermon before Oxford in 1777, he condemned the rebels’ desire to gain influence at England’s ancient universities, to acquire what he termed “Fomentors

124 T. Patten, A Letter to the Right Honourable the Lord North, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, concerning Subscription to the XXXIX Articles (Oxford 1773), p. 18. 125 See, for example, J.E. Bradley, “The Anglican Pulpit, the Social Order, and the Resur- gence of Toryism during the American Revolution”, Albion 21:3 (Autumn 1989), 361–88; H.P. Ippel, “British Sermons and the American Revolution”, Journal of Religious History 12:2 (1982), 191–205. 126 G. Horne, A Sermon Before the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1781), p. 19. 127 On the involvement of college students in the American Revolution see D.W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution 1750–1800 (London, 1985); J. Herbst, From Crisis to Crisis: American College Government, 1636–1819 (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 51 and Abettors in the very Heart of this Kingdom”, “even in our Pulpits—in our Senate—in our most secret and solemn Councils”.128 Nor were such fears unjustified. One student deeply influenced by radical ideas was William Jones, later a leading jurist and oriental scholar.129 A radical Whig while still at Oxford, he went on to associate closely with the likes of Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. Most disturbing for Oxford, however, was Jones’s enthusiasm for using images and examples drawn from his classical education to justify his support for the American Revolution. The author of a pro-American ode in Latin alcaics, “Ad Libertatem,”130 he tried to set himself up within the British government as someone who could broker a deal with the American rebels by using what he styled “a fragment of Polybius” which he believed justified the colonists’ demands for greater independence.131 In complete contrast with the intentions of the Oxford authorities, Jones argued that a training in classical studies should be used to proselytize ideals of liberty, democracy and republicanism among undergraduates. In a speech he had intended to give at his MA graduation but which was later banned by the authorities, he stated this view clearly. Classics, should not, he asserted, produce mere “contemplative men, who spen[d] their days in subtle disputes and refined conferences”, but men of active intelligence like the heroes of old Rome.132 He offered the controversial figures of Selden and Locke as examples of Oxford scholars of this stamp. He praised Selden as “equal to Varro in the vast extent of his knowledge, nor at all inferior to Cato in the greatness of his soul and the ardour of his zeal for the cause of freedom”.133 Well aware of the distaste in which Oxford senior members held his views, somewhat perversely he offered himself as a Whig candidate for one of the university’s parliamentary seats in 1781, unsurprisingly without success. “The late disturbances”, he wrote at the time, referring to his involvement in the Gordon riots, “have contributed very unreasonably

128 M. Cooper, National Humiliation and Repentance Recommended, and the Causes of the Present Rebellion in America Assigned, in a Sermon Preached Before the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1777), p. 11. 129 See M.J. Franklin, “Jones, Sir William (1746–1794)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006. 130 W. Jones, The Works of Sir William Jones Vol. X (London, 1807), pp. 394–400. This was based loosely on William Collins’s Ode to Liberty. 131 J. Parton, The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin Vol. II (New York, 1865), pp. 333–4. 132 W. Jones, An Oration Intended to have been Spoken in the Theatre at Oxford on the 9th of July, by A Member of the University (London, 1773), p. 5. 133 Ibid., 15. 52 chapter one to make the resident Oxonians more adverse than ever to the advocates of liberty, which they absurdly confound with licentiousness.”134 In his use of classical imagery to justify the American Revolution, Jones was far from alone. Indeed, it was a common tactic employed by the rebels themselves. As David W. Robson has shown, the classical curricula of many of the private colleges in America were adapted to inculcate republican virtues throughout the revolutionary period and afterwards.135 This was precisely what senior members at Oxford were keen to prevent. In sermons before the university and its feeder schools, George Horne, appointed Vice-Chancellor in 1776, stressed the proper function of classical studies. Firstly, he urged, students should read only those texts which put forward morally correct views of politics and society, essentially, those which encouraged loyalty to established authority. In particular, texts should be chosen which promoted “a studious disposition” rendering students “little sensible to the allurements of external objects, to those trifles and improprieties which disgrace the man, and degrade the Christian”.136 He stressed, in particular, the moral and political importance of studying only those texts which were of the highest literary quality. When “the best writers of antiquity shall cease to be regarded as our models”, he declared, elegant simplicity and manly energy will give place to a false glare of affecta- tion and refinement: loose and licentious tenets will be tricked out in the meretricious garb of false eloquence. A vitiated taste in writing, like that which preceded the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, will precede our own. Tacitus and Seneca will be imitated, rather than Caesar and Cicero: and epithet, point, and antithesis will prevail, and we shall prepare for slavery.137 In the majority of cases, the measures taken at a college level to increase control over undergraduate reading built on strategies developed earlier in the century to counter student involvement in Jacobite rioting, above all changes to their in-house curriculum and examination system. In the university’s largest college, Christ Church, the collections books reveal

134 The Letters of Sir William Jones Vol. I, ed., G. Cannon (Oxford, 1970), p. 417. 135 See Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution 1750–1800; M. Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (Chichester, 2009). 136 G. Horne, “A Sermon Preached before the Society of Gentlemen, Educated at the King’s School, Canterbury on Thursday, Aug. 26, 1784” in G. Horne, Sixteen Sermons on Various Subjects and Occasions (Oxford, 1793), p. 300. 137 Ibid., 303. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 53 that from the middle of the 1770s, reading lists and internal examinations were made to incorporate all undergraduates, not just foundationers, commoners and servitors, as previously, but also noblemen and gentlemen commoners.138 While clearly having an axe to grind (he was defending his college from the posthumous accusations of Edward Gibbon), James Hurdis’s 1796 pamphlet, A Word or Two in Vindication of the University of Oxford and of Magdalen College in particular, referred to the introduction of a new system of ‘collections’ (or internal examinations) on the model of Christ Church around the year 1770.139 There is also a book which lists those texts said to have been ‘collected’ by students at Magdalen between about 1770 and 1800. The introduction of Christ-Church style examinations at Magdalen is, moreover, independently confirmed in a 1773 pamphlet by a tutor of Brasenose College, John Napleton. Referring to a recent “experi- ment” by an unmentioned college, he recounted detailed regulations for the performance of ‘collections’ before the Principal and Vice-Principal virtually identical to those mentioned by Hurdis.140 From the decanal archive at Trinity, we know that it was decided in 1789 to examine each undergraduate twice a year in hall, and that the books to be studied for the next examination should be made known as soon as possible after the previous one had been completed. What is particularly important about the Trinity case, however, is that it saw the introduction of the competitive principle for the first time in the university’s history. “Undergradu- ates”, the Dean noted, would be “distributed into Classes according to the Proficiency which the Tutors shall judge them to have made.” 141 The new examinations seem to have formed part of a much more extensive shake- up of junior discipline at the college which had begun some ten years earlier in 1778 when Joseph Davie was Dean.142

138 Sutherland, “The Curriculum”, p. 476. 139 J. Hurdis, A Word or Two in Vindication of the University of Oxford and of Magdalen College in particular from the Posthumous Aspersions of Mr Gibbon (Bishopstone, 1796), p. 14. “At the end of every term from his admission till he takes his first degree, every individual undergraduate of this college must appear at a public examination before the President, Vice-President, Deans, and whatever Fellows may please to attend; and cannot obtain leave to return to his friends in any vacation, till he has properly acquitted himself . . .”. On p. 17, Hurdis admits that “it may be true that the terminal exercises, upon their present plan, may not have been in force more than thirty years” which would put the likely date of their introduction around the year 1770. 140 J. Napleton, Considerations on the Public Exercises for the First and Second Degrees in the University of Oxford ([Oxford] 1773), pp. 18–19. 141 Sutherland, “The Curriculum”, 477. 142 Trinity College Archive Liber Decani I, pp. 31–2. At the annual ‘Scrutiny’ which dealt with disciplinary matters, the Dean, Joseph Davie, ordered additional lectures after 54 chapter one

In addition, a number of colleges introduced changes in the classical curriculum of the kind urged by Horne and other conservative dons. In particular, there seems to have been a greater effort to focus on the “best” writers of antiquity, those held to reveal the highest levels of literary style and skill. We remember, from the comments of Horne above, that the reading of such texts was also believed to have important moral benefits for students. Here, the work of John Burton, fellow and tutor of Corpus Christi, is instructive. He believed that a sustained attempt to improve the quality of Greek studies at Oxford would also raise the moral profile of the university. As early as 1758, he began his campaign with the publication of the Pentalogia, an edition (without Latin notes or translation) of plays by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, whose works he felt were unduly neglected at Oxford. In an important letter of the same year to his relative, Edward Bentham, Burton identified those he considered the “best” writers of antiquity. Apart from the dramatists, whose work he had already published, Burton recommended few poets, placing most emphasis on Greek prose writers, particularly historians like Thucydides, Herodotus and Xenophon and orators like Demosthenes.143 It is surely significant that the two most notable features of the Christ Church collections books in the second half of the century are the marked increase in Greek writers generally and in historians in particular. Indeed, among the prose writers, it is Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon who appear most frequently.144 Latin historians, Caesar, Sallust and Livy, also recommended by Burton, make a significant impact towards the end of the century too.145 It seems likely that Bentham, who became a canon at Christ Church in 1754, was the conduit through which Burton’s ideas were transferred to the college’s curriculum. The idea that Bentham was at least partly responsible for this shift of emphasis receives support from the fact that he published his own col-

prayers, additional disputations on Wednesdays and Fridays in term and imposed harsher punishments for non-attendance. From Liber Decani I, pp. 47–8, we learn that in 1788, just one year before the institution of examinations at the college, the Dean ordered the most important rules regarding undergraduate behaviour (which had been substantially rewritten and made tougher over the previous ten years) to be “printed and Copies of them distributed among the Undergraduates, and those who may hereafter enter.” For the introduction of competitive examinations at Trinity, see C. Hopkins, Trinity: 450 Years of an Oxford College Community (Oxford, 2005), pp. 207–8. 143 J. Burton, De litterarum graecarum institutionibus dissertatio critica (Oxford, 1758). 144 P. Quarrie, “The Christ Church Collections Books” in Sutherland and Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. V, p. 497. 145 Ibid., 499. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 55 lection of funeral speeches from Thucydides, Lysias, Xenophon and the Menexenus of pseudo-Plato with increasingly copious notes between 1746 and 1768. In particular, he praised the way in which the speeches taught the need for moderation in all things. The extracts he selected from Xeno- phon exhibited, he wrote, “an illustrious display of prudence and dexterity, as well as courage, and above all of mildness, modesty and benevolence; which latter virtues . . . appear no less productive of Success and Glory, than other military qualities, qualities, more commonly to be met with, of boisterousness and arrogance”.146 Clearly, the works of ancient historians were favoured not simply because they were of great literary merit (and, therefore, in themselves morally uplifting); as Bentham made clear when he recommended Greek and Roman history to his pupils at Oriel in 1748, they were also felt to contain valuable moral lessons, particularly about the evils of democracy and the dangers of questioning established authority.147 Thus, it seems particularly significant that in the final four decades of the eighteenth century, two of the most popular Latin texts in the Christ Church collections books dealt with the suppression of the famous Catilinarian conspiracy against the Roman state in the late first century BC: Cicero’s In Catilinam and Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae.148 From the limited evidence we have about the curriculum at other colleges, there seems to have been a similar concentration on historical and oratorical texts. As part of the new examination syllabus introduced at Magdalen around 1770, according to Hurdis, students would study Sallust as well as Xenophon’s Anabasis in the first year, Caesar’s Commentaries in the second, Livy, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Memorabilia in the third, while Tacitus’s Annals and Cicero’s In Catilinam were read in the fourth year;149 and this was out of a total of just twenty-four specified texts. On the list which survives of examination books set one year between 1789 and 1800 at Trinity, there is a similar emphasis on history and oratory. First-year undergraduates read Xenophon’s Memorabilia and either Livy or Tacitus, while second years occupied themselves with Cicero’s De Officiis

146 E. Bentham, Funeral Eulogies upon Military Men from Thucydides, Plato, Lysias, Xenophon, 2nd edition (Oxford, 1768), pp. 10–11. 147 M.L. Clarke (“Classical Studies”, p. 523) has identified what he thinks is a “deliberate policy” to increase the proportion of historical texts studied. However, Clarke attributed it to a desire on the part of the college authorities, particularly the Dean, William Markham, to avoid a repetition of work already done at school or to Christ Church’s special reputation as a trainer of public statesmen. 148 Quarrie, “The Christ Church Collections Books”, pp. 499–501. 149 Hurdis, A Word or Two in Vindication, pp. 15–17. 56 chapter one and Quintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria. The third and fourth years, however, were largely given up to the study of poetry and a combination of logic and mathematics. Aristotlelian philosophy, in the form of the Poet- ics and the Organon, was also introduced in the final two years of study.150 It is likely that the curricula in many other colleges also focused on the works of ancient historians, for Edward Bentham was able to refer to “a constant application to ancient history” among Oxford students generally in a pamphlet from 1776. Significantly, he linked this development with the context of the American Revolution. In a work which justified the university’s decision to condemn the rebels, Bentham praised the beneficent moral effects of reading works of ancient history at Oxford: Here we peruse with sedulous attention the antient pages of the Grecian and Roman sages, and extract from them those excellent precepts of political prudence, which they have delivered to us with all the graces of elocution.151 Historical texts, in particular, were crucial to “instill in the minds of youth a reverential awe for those who are placed in exalted stations”, to help them “imbibe the excellent precepts that no man is wiser than the laws, that none can wish for an opportunity of being emancipated from their authority, without deviating widely from the rules of virtue and losing the valuable privilege of being entitled to the advantages of civil rights”.152 In his pamphlet of 1776, Bentham referred to the moral lessons contained in classical texts as forming only one half of a syllabus designed to inculcate loyalty to established authority, the other half consisting of a thorough-going training in conservative divinity. At Oxford, he wrote, “Philosophy and Theology reciprocally join their assisting powers together, to point out to our ingenuous youth the characteristics that constitute the difference between justice and dishonesty, truth and falsehood, liberty and licentiousness”.153 It seems likely that there was an implied contrast with Cambridge here whose latitudinarian theology was seen as a key factor in the promotion of a rebellious attitude among its undergraduates. In both

150 Trinity College Archive, Misc. iii (“Books Appointed for Examination at Trinity Col- lege, Oxford”). There is a note in pen on the list “In the time of Messrs. Moulding and Kett—before 1800.” Since we know that examinations were only begun in 1789, this list has to refer to one of the years between 1789 and 1800. 151 [E. Bentham], The Honor of the University of Oxford Defended Against the Illiberal Aspersions of E-d B-e Esq., with Pertinent Observations on the Present Rebellion in America (London [1776]), p. 5. 152 Ibid., 4–5. 153 Ibid., 5. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 57 the Christ Church collections books and the reading lists from other colleges, the combination of classics and divinity is also apparent. According to the former, students were required to read the New Testament in Greek, the Thirty-Nine Articles as well as a number of commentaries designed to inculcate loyalty to the established church, the most popular being the De Veritate Religionis Christianae by Grotius.154 First-year undergraduates at Trinity were also examined in Grotius. At Magdalen, according to Hurdis, every fourth term was given over to a study of a different part of the New Testament with the help of the “best commentaries”.155 At a university level this policy received support with the holding of the first Bampton Lectures in 1780 which all undergraduates were obliged to hear in place of the usual Sunday sermon. Although the lectures were first mentioned in 1751 in the will of John Bampton, their stated aim, “to confirm and establish the Christian Faith and to confute all schismatics and heretics” held a particular relevance in the wake of the American Revolution.156 That the institution of the lectures should be linked with the fears of senior members about the spread of radical religious ideas receives some support from the fact that it was under George Horne, in his role as Vice-Chancellor, that the first set of Bampton Lectures took place. Another important feature of the Christ Church collections books in these years is a tendency to mirror very closely the curriculum of the university’s feeder schools. This may be interpreted as further evidence that college authorities were reluctant to expose undergraduates to new (and potentially dangerous) ideas in the wake of the American Revolution. A number of the plays praised by John Burton, for example, had formed staple parts of the classical curriculum at leading public schools for many years. The edition of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Vinctus (one of the most frequently read plays in the second half of the century) most often consulted by students had originally been published as a textbook for Eton schoolboys.157 The same is true of the most commonly read plays by Euripides (Medea and Hippolytus), which were most often studied with editions published

154 Quarrie, “The Christ Church Collections Books”, p. 503 specifies a number of defences of Anglicanism which were regularly read throughout the final four decades of the eighteenth century such as Pearson’s Exposition of the Creed, originally published in 1659. 155 Hurdis, A Few Words in Vindication, pp. 15–17. 156 J. Bandinel, Eight Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, in the Year 1780, at the Lecture Founded by the late Rev. and Pious John Bampton (Oxford, 1780), front matter. 157 Quarrie, “The Christ Church Collections Books”, p. 496. 58 chapter one for Eton pupils.158 A similar picture emerges when we consider the Latin writers who appeared most frequently in the collections books. The two most prominent, Cicero and Caesar, were precisely those which dominated the curricula of the university’s feeder schools;159 and Virgil and Horace were favourites of both schoolboys and Christ Church undergraduates. From what we know of the books to be read for collections at other colleges, in this period, it appears to have been a similar story. Virgil and Horace were key components of the syllabus described by Hurdis at Magdalen160 and formed the focus of third-year work at Trinity.161 From the correspondence of undergraduates like John James, who studied at Queens between 1777 and 1782, we know that these texts were among the most frequently read at other colleges too.162 While allowing for some exaggeration, it seems we may credit the observation of Henry Fynes Clinton in 1799 that barely any addition had been made to his classical knowledge during his time at the university with a fairly high degree of accuracy. 163 An emphasis on school-boy texts was matched by a similar stress on school-boy tasks. The traditional exercises of Latin and Greek versification, the writing of non-controversial Latin themes and, above all, the practice of construing continued to dominate the college curriculum in the final decades of the century. In his 1781 study, Liberal Education, Vicesimus Knox criticized the juvenile character of university studies, declaring that the overall achievement of undergraduates at the end of their time at Oxford was “usually such as a school-boy could equal”.164 Clearly, the emphasis was on perfecting the skills of composition and translation developed at school, rather than on promoting a critical engagement with the content of the texts themselves. In many ways, this policy may be seen as the curricular equivalent of the widespread attempts by the college authorities

158 Quarrie, “The Christ Church Collections Books”, p. 496. 159 Ibid., 499. 160 Hurdis, A Word or Two in Vindication, pp. 15–16. Caesar’s Commentaries were studied in the second year and various works of Cicero in the second, third and fourth years. 161 Trinity College Archive misc iii (“Books Appointed for Examinations at Trinity College, Oxford”). 162 While a student at Queen’s, John James translated Cicero’s De Officiis into English and then translated his English version back into Latin and compared it with the original. See Letters of Richard Radcliffe and John James of Queen’s College, Oxford 1755–83, ed., M. Evans (Oxford, 1888), p. 50. 163 The Literary Remains of Henry Fynes Clinton, ed., C.J. Fynes Clinton (London, 1854), pp. 8–13, 22. 164 V. Knox, Liberal Education, 2nd edition (London, 1789), p. 202. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 59 to enforce (and indeed to strengthen) their own internal systems of discipline which some historians have identified in this period.165 Enforcing the disciplinary regulations demanded by the Laudian statutes, drawn up when the average undergraduate was of school-boy age, including the early locking of college gates, compulsory chapel attendance and correct academic dress, would only have served to reinforce the efforts of college authorities to gain greater control over student reading. In his proposal to Lord Townshend in 1715, Humphrey Prideaux had recommended a similar combination of curricular and disciplinary measures to overcome student indolence, the major cause, he felt, of undergraduate involvement in Jacobite rioting earlier in the century.166 In addition to measures taken by individual colleges, the troubled years of the 1770s provided the backdrop for the first schemes of suggested changes at a university level. In 1773, John Napleton, fellow and tutor of Brasenose College, published his Considerations on the Public Exercises which V.H.H. Green has described as “the first [work] to highlight the problem posed by the outmoded [BA] examination system, and to suggest that there was a measure of serious concern in Oxford for reforms”.167 In this pamphlet, Napleton described the beginnings of inter-collegiate discussion on the subject. At a “meeting of several respectable Members of the University, a few months ago”, he wrote, “the Public Exercises for the First and Second Degrees became . . . the subject of conversation. All concerned lamented the low condition into which they were fallen, and . . . express[ed] their wishes that some effectual method might be adopted to restore them to their ancient dignity”.168 The level of support for change is clear from Napleton’s statement that no less a person than the “Vice-Chancellor had formally recommended it in a full meeting of the Heads of Houses and Proctors, as a matter greatly deserving their attentive consideration”.169 Napleton’s consistent use of the term ‘restore’ instead of ‘reform’ is indicative of the fundamentally conservative aims of the changes he recommended; it is clear from the text itself that their primary function was to strengthen the authority of senior members and their control over

165 See, for example, Rothblatt, “The Student Sub-culture and the Examination System”, pp. 276–7. 166 Green, “Reformers and Reform in the University”, p. 607. 167 Ibid., 615. 168 Napleton, Considerations on the Public Exercises, p. i. 169 Ibid., i. 60 chapter one undergraduates and bachelors. They would afford the student an “additional incitement . . . to pay due attention to the literary discipline of his College” and would tend “consequently to diminish dissipation [and] irregularity”.170 Although by 1773 conditions in some colleges like Christ Church and Magdalen had become stricter, at the level of the university examinations, students were free to choose not only which books they would be questioned on, but also which masters would act as their examiners. The only formal check was that a proctor had to approve the choice, which was nearly always done. Napleton sought to curb both of these freedoms. Instead, he argued, there should be a uniform syllabus for all students (irrespective of their colleges) and examiners should be appointed centrally and paid well in order to “render [the position] rather an object of honour than of interest”.171 In particular, he sought to gain a more effective control over student attitudes and behaviour by encouraging greater levels of mutual emulation among undergraduates reading for a degree. Students, he argued, should be obliged to attend the examinations of other undergraduates so that they would feel under greater pressure to perform themselves. To maximize the benefit of such emulation, he stressed the need for an honours system with different classes of degree. Here it is possible that he had the model of Cambridge in mind, whose system of competitive examination with honours was well established by the 1770s.172 The aim of strengthening senior authority is also prominent in the subjects which Napleton recommended. The traditional classical syllabus received great emphasis, particularly Aristotelian logic, which, he argued, would provide students with the necessary skills to distinguish and defeat the fallacious arguments of dissenters and political radicals. “Truth and falsehood”, he wrote, “are so often . . . interwoven together” in the arguments of such men “that . . . the True Philosopher will be the more desirous . . . to qualify himself, in the clearest and most decisive manner, to detect and expose error, however speciously or consciously recommended.”173 Equally important was the other traditional element of the Oxford syllabus, divinity. Indeed, Napleton was the first to suggest that an element of compulsory divinity (in the form of questions on the New Testament and Thirty-Nine Articles) should form part of the degree examination. “I need not enlarge,” he wrote, “on the extensive utility of

170 Napleton, Considerations on the Public Exercises, p. 59. 171 Ibid., 33. 172 Ibid., 30. 173 Ibid., 44. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 61 such a measure . . . in an age which renders it peculiarly necessary, to send out our Youth well instructed in the principles of Christianity, engaged early on the side of Truth and Virtue, and steadily attached upon mature convictions to the purest Church in the world.”174 He also urged that the distinction between junior and senior members be made sharper by dif- ferentiating more clearly between the examinations for the BA and MA. In this he followed the aim of the Laudian statutes which had restricted the analytical study of ancient history, political philosophy and metaphysics to the MA student. The particular subjects studied, wrote Napleton, should “rise in dignity, as [the candidate] advances in standing and knowledge.”175 Convinced of the need for change of some kind, Napleton wrote, “we may reasonably have some valuable regulations and amendments to hope for as well as . . . absurd refinements and dangerous innovations to fear. We cannot, in any case, more effectually defeat the one, than by promoting and encouraging the other”.176 The 1780s saw the publication of other contributions to the burgeoning debate which pushed for much more radical, modern changes to the university exercises. Such, for example, was the well-known work of Whig school master and moral reformer, Vicesimus Knox, Liberal Educa- tion, which first appeared in 1781 and went through some nine editions before the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. On the surface such works appear to be pursuing a very different agenda from conservatives like Napleton and have usually been interpreted as such by historians. While it is true that Knox, who had also been a fellow of St John’s Col- lege, was keen to see the introduction of a more varied, modern curriculum including English, modern history and natural science, his proposals shared important similarities with those of conservative commentators like Napleton. Most importantly, he shared the latter’s concern about student discipline and saw changes to the syllabus as a vital tool in improving junior-senior relations. Classical studies also had a role to play in Knox’s plans. Rather than restricting students’ access to knowledge or using them to inculcate correct moral principles, Knox believed that a more challenging classical curriculum, involving, for example, the critical study of ancient politics and philosophy, alongside modern subjects, might do much to “expand” the minds of undergraduates, inducing them

174 Napleton, Considerations on the Public Exercises, p. 37. 175 Ibid., 50. 176 Ibid., 60. 62 chapter one to work harder and so improving their behaviour. “[T]his enlargement, refinement, and embellishment of the mind”, he wrote, “is the best and noblest effect of classical discipline.”177 Contrary to what has often been claimed, the changes introduced with the Statute of 1800 cannot be explained solely as the product of the reforming zeal of Oxford senior members after the relative slumber of the eighteenth century. Nor can developments in eighteenth-century Oxford be used to support an argument for the peculiar adaptability of the Brit- ish elite in this period. While there is evidence to suggest that reforms at Cambridge were, to a considerable extent, inspired by a growing desire to adapt the type of education provided to the older undergraduate now entering the university, such concerns seem to have played a less significant role at Oxford. While Cambridge responded positively to the challenge presented by a rising student age and the new ideas emerging from the Scientific Revolution, senior members at Oxford shied away from all new developments in politics, science and religion and fought hard to strengthen the traditional curriculum of classics and divinity. Indeed, when the two universities are compared, a very different image of the British elite emerges from that repeatedly presented in Whiggish histories of eighteenth century Britain—a ruling class that was fundamentally dis- united, fractured along religious, political and generational lines. By acknowledging that the differences between the two universities were greater than has often been thought, we are able to see that the reforms undertaken at Cambridge were primarily the product of its own inherent traditions of Whig politics and religious latitudinarianism, rather than of attitudes common to the British elite as a whole. The different conditions at Oxford, combined with several decades of persistent government disfavour, produced, by contrast, a distinct unwillingness to modernize the curriculum and an anxious determination among senior members to retain control against the background of increasingly fraught relations with the undergraduate population. By concluding that Oxford and Cambridge did not constitute a homogenous cultural space in the eighteenth century, we can begin to take further the observations of those few historians who have questioned the progressive nature of the 1800 Statute. Rather than being simply a reaction to the French Revolution, as Sheldon Rothblatt has suggested, the main provisions of the statute, above all the introduction of competitive examination and a uniform

177 V. Knox, Liberal Education (London, 1781), pp. 3–4. riot, revolution and ‘reform’ in the colleges 63 syllabus, must be seen as the culmination of a much longer process. These and other measures had been implemented much earlier at a college level in response to similar fears about the susceptibility of junior members to dangerous ideas, particularly in the context of their enthusiastic involvement in Jacobite rioting. As such, they were the product of more than half a century of growing tension between junior and senior members and not simply a reaction to the French Revolution. Indeed, we can see a clear development from the measures enacted by individual colleges in the first half of the century to the proposal of similar responses at a university level. The French Revolution was not even the key event in bringing about this shift, but rather the increased threat felt to be posed by religious and political radicals against the background of the American Revolution. Events in France certainly brought about an intensification of the debate, as will be seen in the next chapter, but they merely carried on a process of reaction already well established at England’s oldest university. Chapter Two

‘ADAPTED TO THE PRESENT TIMES’? THE NEW EXAMINATION STATUTE OF 1800

That the Statute of 1800 has been interpreted as representing nothing more than the first attempts to reform the university after the torpor of the eighteenth century is perhaps not surprising given that this is precisely the tone which the preamble strikes. Underplaying, to some extent, the radical nature of the changes introduced, the Statute claims to do nothing more than replace an outmoded method of examining BA candidates by regent masters of arts with a more efficient system of six public examiners. The previous practice, we are told, was “very ill adapted to the present times”.1 Only a few historians, most notably, Sheldon Rothblatt, have questioned this interpretation and looked for additional motivations behind the statute’s introduction. Specifically, Rothblatt linked the introduction of competitive examination with a desire to increase the power of senior members in the context of growing fears of domestic Jacobinism in the 1790s.2 Although rightly signalling the conservative aims of the statute, framed in these terms, it appears as little more than a defensive reaction to the French Revolution. Indeed, Rothblatt confessed his frustration at being unable to formulate a more detailed assessment of the motivations behind the statute’s introduction. This is chiefly because the minutes of the Hebdomadal Board meetings are almost entirely lost for the crucial period between 1793 and 1800 and there are no documents surviving which state precisely what the aims of the statute were.3 As suggested in the previous chapter, the origins of the statute’s provisions, in particular,

1 Ward and Heywood (eds.), Statutes Vol. I, p. 29. 2 Rothblatt, “The Student Sub-culture and the Examination System”, pp. 286–7; Green, “Reformers and Reform in the University” in Sutherland and Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. V, pp. 622–3; M.G. Brock, “The Oxford of Peel and Gladstone, 1800–1833” in Brock and Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. VI, p. 8; Stone, “Social Control and Intellectual Excellence: Oxbridge and Edinburgh 1560– 1983”, pp. 22–3. 3 There are minutes surviving for one meeting in 1796, two in 1798 and one in 1800. See, for example, S. Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates, recognizable as such”, p. 148; Green, “Reformers and Reform in the University”, p. 623. the new examination statute of 1800 65 the uniform syllabus of classical studies and divinity and the introduction of competitive examinations should in fact be sought much further back. It was argued that the statute should be seen as the culmination of a much longer process, the product of more than half a century of growing mistrust between junior and senior members. We saw that many of the statute’s provisions had already been adopted at a college level in the wake of heavy student involvement in Jacobite rioting in the first half of the century and in response to the perceived threat from dissenters in the 1760s and 1770s. In particular, we saw that it was the rebellion of the American colonists in the 1770s which produced the first widespread calls for such changes at a university level, rather than the French Revolution, as Rothblatt has suggested. Building on these insights, this chapter argues that the immediate context in which the statute was introduced provides further evidence to support the view that the motivations behind it were fundamentally conservative. While events in France did not alter the situation dramatically, they did give added impetus to discussions already underway. Over the course of the 1790s, there developed a broad coalition of senior members, from all sides of the political spectrum, in favour of change at a university level. Crucially, the Vice-Chancellor and heads of houses became actively involved in discussions for the first time. The continuity with developments earlier in the century is clear though; most importantly, from the similarity of the proposals made, but also from the leading role taken by a number of Hutchinsonians, who had played a prominent part in the university’s response to the Jacobite riots and the American Revolution. The content of the statute itself can likewise tell us much about the aims it was designed to fulfil. While historians have sometimes commented on the chief features of the “new” system, above all the introduction of competitive examinations, they have not examined in detail the syllabus it prescribed or the language in which the various provisions were couched. Despite the claim in the preamble that the new examination system would be better “adapted to the present times”, the curriculum it laid down not only upheld, but actually strengthened, the traditional dominance of classics and divinity. When taken together with other measures designed to enhance the powers of examiners and senior members in general, as well as the reformed Statute of 1807, which tightened the syllabus still further, significant weight is lent to the argument that the statute’s framers intended it to increase the university’s control over the activities of junior members and the reading material to which they were exposed. 66 chapter two

The way in which both statutes were received in the years immediately following their introduction does much to corroborate this interpretation. To a surprising degree, both critics and supporters interpreted the statutes as designed to strengthen the position of the university authorities vis-à-vis junior members. Somewhat ironically, the attempts which Oxford made to defend the educational value of its degree course, in particular, the Replies of Edward Copleston to a set of charges in the Edinburgh Review, leave the reader with a similar impression. In the importance they placed on maintaining discipline and on the idea that undergraduates were not yet fully grown men (and should be treated accordingly), they support the view that it was a central aim of the statutes to facilitate a greater degree of control over student behaviour.

The Impact of the French Revolution

To many in England, the upheavals in France, just like those in America, were seen as a generational conflict, a revolt of precocious half-educated young men against established order. This view was particularly popular in Oxford, possibly spread by the growing numbers of émigré French priests who came to reside in the university over the course of the 1790s. In France, the journalist, Mallet du Pan, described Paris on the eve of the Revolution as “full of young men who take a little facility to be talent, of clerks, accountants, soldiers, who make themselves into authors, die of hunger, even beg, and turn out pamphlets.”4 As J.R. Gillis has remarked, it was “from this proletariat de bacheliers” that “the likes of Marat and Brissot” were recruited, “young men of uncertain or failed careers, who would find their vocation in revolution.”5 The idea that young men, not yet fully-educated, were particularly susceptible to revolutionary ideas found an Oxford already primed to accept this assumption following similar sto- ries about the spread of radical ideas in the former American colonies. The outbreak of the French Revolution gave added impetus to the production of the kind of over-arching schemes of university reform we examined in the previous chapter. As well as spawning new contributions to the debate, it appears to have rendered more conservative the views of a number of commentators who had previously been in favour of a

4 Cited in R. Darnton, “The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre- Revolutionary France” Past and Present 51:1 (1971), 94. 5 Gillis, Youth and History, p. 83. the new examination statute of 1800 67 certain degree of modern reform. Along with expressions of anxiety about growing student disobedience, Vicesimus Knox had stressed the need for Oxford to take account of recent developments in science and mathematics in his 1781 study, Liberal Education.6 However, in a letter to Lord North, Chancellor of Oxford, written shortly after the outbreak of the French Revolution, he recommended a strengthening of the traditional syllabus, in particular, that “biblical learning” should be made a compulsory part of the examination for BA candidates intending to take orders.7 In addition, he called for more extreme measures to buttress the authority of senior members. These measures mirrored, in many ways, the changes which were already taking place at a college level. Thus, he put forward proposals which would more clearly distinguish between junior and senior members by abolishing all intermediate divisions, particularly the privileges attached to the status of gentleman commoner and nobleman. He argued for much stronger sumptuary legislation to curb the extravagant spending of richer students; undergraduates should not be allowed to keep horses and dogs and the university should establish an inspectorate to ensure that these rules were upheld.8 More importantly, gentlemen commoners and noblemen should sit the same examinations as all other students.9 In addition, he proposed measures which would substantially increase the powers of senior members. The number of tutors should be increased in proportion to the students, their stipends significantly raised and the senior tutor in each college given the powers of a proctor.10 Finally, in order to increase the time which undergraduates spent under the surveillance of senior members, he argued that residence should be for eight, not six, months of the year.11 A similar development is traceable in the views of Edward Tatham, then fellow of Lincoln College. When he first published proposals for the reform of Oxford’s public exercises in his Bampton Lectures of 1789, The Chart and Scale of Truth, Tatham had made his reputation as by far the most outspoken critic of the traditional classical curriculum within the university. He denounced the dominance of Aristotelian philosophy

6 See above, p. 61. 7 V. Knox, A Letter to the Right Hon. Lord North (London, 1789), p. x. 8 Ibid., vii. There had been a consistent strengthening of sumptuary legislation at a number of Oxford colleges since the mid 1770s. For details of the policy at Trinity College, see Trinity College Archive misc. iii. 9 Ibid., viii. 10 Ibid., viii–ix. 11 Ibid., vii. 68 chapter two and the practice, as he saw it, of teaching grown men the “infancy of science” from a fear of what might happen if they were exposed to modern learning. Intellectually, he presented himself as a disciple of Bacon and Locke and was one of the few champions of Enlightenment thought at Oxford.12 He even gave a cautious welcome to the French Revolution in its early stages.13 However, as events began to turn bloody, Tatham repo- sitioned himself dramatically as a vociferous opponent of Jacobinism. He linked English dissenters like Joseph Priestley firmly with the crimes of the revolutionaries in France. “By a most impertinent and obtrusive Conduct”, he declared, in a university sermon of 1791, “they opened up a correspondence with that country [France] and formed clubs and anniversaries in order to celebrate and emblazon its proceedings, and to hold up its political conduct as an example for the imitation of England.”14 He was also led to alter his stance on modern learning when he saw the revolutionaries in France using Bacon and Locke to justify their cause. Increasingly influenced by a Burkean conservatism which stressed the moral value of a classical education, Oxford’s traditional syllabus began to hold a new- found charm for Tatham and he began to attack the revolutionaries for their rejection of ancient wisdom. They “labour,” he wrote, “to deprive us of the political learning of antiquity, and of [the ancients’] collective wisdom and experience”.15 “Without experience for their foundations”, he continued, “or learning for their guide, without principles of judgment and without reasoning at all, the leaders of this faction usurp the claim to superior knowledge, and are the school-masters in politics to instruct the rising age.”16 For a brief interlude in his career, Tatham became the champion of the traditional Oxford curriculum of classics and divinity. Quoting now from the bible and now from Aristotle’s Ethics (the very text whose dominance at Oxford he had earlier deplored) he argued that every individual should submit himself to established authority. “If Politics be a branch of moral law”, he wrote, quoting Aristotle, “submission to civil authority is

12 E. Tatham, The Chart and Scale of Truth Vol. I (Oxford, 1790), p. 318. 13 See here E. Tatham, The Following is a Letter Sent by Dr. Tatham to the Stewards of the Anniversary of the Revolution in France (Oxford, 1791) in which Tatham refused an invitation to attend a celebration marking the second anniversary of the French Revolution. In the initial invitation he was described as a “Friend of Liberty in England.” 14 E. Tatham, A Sermon preached before the University of Oxford on the 5th of November 1791 (London, 1791), p. 30. 15 Ibid., 32, 38. 16 Ibid., 30. the new examination statute of 1800 69 a necessary, unqualified, unstipulated duty, forming the most important part of moral virtue.”17 He used other key Oxford texts including Cicero’s De Re Publica to promote the British constitution to a university audience as the perfect political settlement envisaged by the ancients.18 Indeed, he concluded that only a profound study of ancient philosophy qualified men to question the correctness of established political institutions. Such deep and important issues were “not to be compassed by the depths of mathematics or to be conquered by the subtleties of synthetic science”.19 Politics, he argued, citing Aristotle once more, was the most complex and challenging of all the sciences and totally unsuitable for young men who were not mature enough to understand it.20 Thus, despite his former emphasis upon the maturity of the undergraduate and the need to enlarge the mind through modern studies, when faced with the full horror of events in France, Tatham chose to side with tradition and with Aristotle. The links which Tatham and many other senior members made between the French revolutionaries and the English dissenters were far from imaginary. Joseph Priestley had been soliciting students directly in polemical pamphlets as early as 1786. In the series of Letters he wrote at that time to undergraduates at both Oxford and Cambridge, he not only sought to undermine the confidence of students in the doctrines of the Anglican Church, but also to make them question the authority of their tutors. “Pay no regard to the authority of names”, he told them, “but only to the weight of argument.”21 He went so far as to recommend an alternative list of books on divinity and urged them to disobey their tutors, particularly over the issue of subscription.22 He likewise prescribed an alternative secular curriculum of mathematics and experimental philosophy with a particular emphasis on the works of Newton.23 This was clearly based on his respect for the curriculum at Cambridge which he praised for its far more receptive attitude to notions of religious freedom when compared with Oxford.24

17 Tatham, A Sermon preached before the University of Oxford on the 5th of November 1791, p. 8. Here Tatham references and quotes from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.1. 18 Ibid., 22. Here he quotes Cicero, De Re Publica ii. 19 Ibid., 21. 20 Ibid., 21. Here he quotes Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.1. 21 J. Priestley, Letters to Dr. Horne, Dean of Canterbury; To the Young Men who are in a Course of Education for the Christian Ministry at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge (Birmingham, 1787), p. 52. 22 Ibid., 56–7. 23 Ibid., 66. 24 Ibid., 63–4. 70 chapter two

In his Letters to undergraduates, Priestley directed his efforts, in particular, towards denouncing writings by prominent Hutchinsonians. Various works by George Horne and the Catholic Doctrine of the Trinity, published by William Jones of Nayland in 1756, were especial objects of attack.25 This fact is significant when considering the nature of the conservative response to the French Revolution at Oxford in the 1790s and the effect it had upon suggestions for the reform of the university syllabus and examination system. Priestley was not firing ammunition at old and irrelevant writers. As we saw in the previous chapter, Hutchinsonians like Horne and Jones had been important in co-ordinating the university’s response to the American Revolution and alongside moderate conservatives like Napleton and Whig writers like Knox and Tatham, were to play a leading role in the cross-party anti-Jacobin coalition which emerged within the university over the course of the 1790s. As Jones himself put it in the emotive preface to the 1799 republication of Horne’s Apology for Certain Gentlemen at the University of Oxford, “the outrageous wickedness of the world has brought all honest and good men nearer together; and united them in one great struggle against barbarians, who are the sworn enemies of truth, wisdom and humanity”.26 This unprecedented conservative alliance even led him in a slightly earlier work to recommend Tatham’s sermon of 5 November 1791,27 a man whose writings he would previously have abhorred. Even before 1789, Priestley found his Letters to students answered by Horne, now President of Magdalen, who offered a stinging riposte in the name of Oxford’s undergraduates, denouncing Priestley as “an enemy to authority”.28 The outbreak of revolution in France, however, saw a flurry of publications from the pens of Horne and other Hutchinsonians. In a timely sermon on “Submission to Government”, given on October 25 1789, Horne warned of the dreadful consequences for the nation if the English clergy failed to stem the tide of revolutionary feeling in their own country.29 To meet this challenge, he argued, it was crucial for senior members to gain greater control over students at both universities, precisely what

25 Priestley, Letters to Dr. Horne, Dean of Canterbury, p. 74. 26 G. Horne, An Apology for Certain Gentlemen at the University of Oxford 2nd edition (London, 1799), p. vi. 27 W. Jones (ed.), The Scholar Armed Against the Errors of the Time Vol. I (London, 1795), p. 3. 28 G. Horne, A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Priestley. By an Undergraduate (Oxford, 1787), p. 28. 29 G. Horne, Discourses on Several Subjects and Occasions Vol. II (Oxford 1794), p. 360. the new examination statute of 1800 71 he had maintained in the context of the Jacobite riots in the late 1740s and in the wake of the American Revolution. In the same sermon, he stressed the value of Greek and Roman history in illustrating the “seditions and commotions” which he took to be the normal consequences of radical democracy.30 In a later piece, written in 1791, just a year before his death, Horne criticized the tendency of a curriculum in which mathematics and experimental science “claim a superior if not an exclusive excellence” to instil undue pride and destroy the “teachable, child-like dispositions” required of students training for the Anglican ministry.31 There followed a spate of republications of leading Hutchinsonian texts, both from the 1750s and later. Just two years after Horne’s death in 1792, a new two-volume edition of his Discourses on Several Subjects and Occasions appeared. Much of the impetus behind these republications seems to have been provided by William Jones of Nayland, one of the original Hutchinsonians, who lived until 1800. In 1792, he founded the Society for the Reformation of Principles which endeavoured to ensure that students at Oxford and Cambridge, particularly the majority training for the Anglican ministry, would not be seduced by the ideology of dissenters and revolutionaries. For the members of the Society, as for Tatham, Knox and Napleton, there was nothing to distinguish between those promoting innovation in religion and those seeking a new political order. “We have long been witnesses to the artifices and assiduity of sec- taries, republicans, socinians and infidels”, wrote Jones in 1795. They may differ “in their opinions, but if any mischief is aimed at . . .; if any popular lure is thrown out for the raising of a party, and promoting some public disturbance, they never fail to make a common cause of it”.32 Jones saw dissenters and republicans as targeting the universities in particular and compared them directly with “that literary cabal in France” described by Burke in his Reflections, “which by poisoning the fountains of literature, of late effected the destruction of their church and government”. “The same practices, and with the same views are now carrying on in this country”, he concluded.33

30 Horne, Discourses on Several Subjects and Occasions Vol. II, p. 362. 31 G. Horne, A Charge Intended to have been Delivered to the Clergy of Norwich, at the Primary Visitation of George, Lord Bishop of that Diocese (Norwich, 1791), p. 9. 32 Jones (ed.), The Scholar Armed, p. i. 33 Ibid., ii. 72 chapter two

The seminal publications of the Society, The Scholar Armed,34 a collection of tracts (including many works by leading Hutchinsonians including Horne) and the periodical, The British Critic, aimed to provide an acceptable, orthodox curriculum of the sort which Jones would have liked to have seen introduced at Oxford. “[T]here can be no prospect of amendment”, he wrote in the preface to The Scholar Armed, till a new and better course of study shall take place. Of this the Society being fully persuaded, have determined to collect . . . and will recommend to young students (especially students in divinity) such Tracts as may furnish their minds with good principles and with such sober and strong reasons as may . . . enable them not only to retain their own ground for themselves, but also to recover to the truth those who have departed from it.35 Jones’s view that it was the infiltration of French academies by revolutionary ideas which caused the Revolution was a popular one. It was to an abandonment of classics and divinity that fellow High Churchman, Ralph Churton, suggested in a university sermon in 1793 that one could trace “the want of subordination” and “the impatience of discipline” which characterized French “seminaries of learning”. Summing up the chief motivation of the ‘reform’ movement at Oxford, Churton declared his wish that if “there is the remotest Tendency to similar passions in our own country and among ourselves, we should crush the growing evil in the bud”.36 While calls for changes at a university level were growing more intense, students themselves were treated with increasing suspicion by college authorities. In particular, senior members frustrated any attempts by undergraduates to organize themselves in groups or societies. At some point between 1788 and 1791, George Canning, together with Lord Henry Spencer and several other undergraduates at Christ Church formed a debating society. To signal their republican views, the members adopted a special uniform which paid homage to Demosthenes, Cicero, Pitt the Younger and Charles Fox, proposed dangerous Whig and even revolu-

34 The Scholar Armed produced by the Society for the Reformation of Principles was modelled on an earlier collection of tracts produced in 1780 by one of its members, Wil- liam Stevens, the cousin of George Horne, to inform students training for the ministry about the errors of dissenters. This earlier collection had contained some four tracts by William Jones and two by Stevens. See W. Stevens (ed.), The Scholar Armed Against the Errors of Infidelity, Enthusiasm, and Disloyalty; or, a Collection of Tracts on the Principles of Religion, Government, and Ecclesiastical Polity (London, 1780). 35 Jones (ed.), The Scholar Armed, p. vii. 36 R. Churton, A Sermon Preached Before the University of Oxford at St Mary’s on Friday, April 19, 1793 (Oxford, 1793), p. 17. the new examination statute of 1800 73 tionary toasts, and debated controversial political issues. As such they quickly became a source of concern to the Dean of Christ Church, Cyril Jackson, who dealt the society its death blow when he convinced Canning to leave.37 Even clubs which excluded political and religious themes from their discussions were viewed suspiciously by the authorities. Such was the experience of the members of the Literary Society at Trinity College when Joseph Chapman was President. Having presented a paper in 1794 “On the pleasure which men take in horrid spectacles” which apparently strayed too close to a discussion of contemporary events in France, one undergraduate, John Skinner, was obliged to resign from the society by the President, who took active steps to control the club’s activities and vet its membership.38 More dramatically, John Parsons, shortly after becoming Master of Balliol in 1798, forcibly shut down the recently-founded junior common room, finding it an unacceptable challenge to the authority of the college’s senior members. According to Benjamin Jowett, he went so far as to burn the society’s “book of rules” before the eyes of its leading members.39 These suspicions made themselves felt at a university level as well. In 1795, a deputation of students from a variety of colleges calling themselves the Society for Scientific and Literary Disquisition petitioned the Vice-Chancellor, John Wills, to hold meetings in a hired house. From his answer to T.F. Dibdin and the other petitioners (in particular, his reference to “these times”), it is clear that the chaos of the French Revolution and the suspicion which attached to gatherings of educated young men in its wake had been at the forefront of his mind. “Gentlemen”, he said, there does not appear to be anything subversive of academic discipline, or contrary to the statutes of the University—but as it is impossible to predict how they may operate, and as innovations of this sort, and in these times, may have a tendency which may be as little anticipated as it may be dis- tressing to the framers of such laws, I am compelled . . . to interdict your meeting in the manner proposed.

37 C.E. Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford Vol. III (London, 1927), p. 174; C. Hollis, The Oxford Union (London, 1965), p. 12. 38 H.H.E Craster, “Oxford Literary Societies of the Eighteenth Century”, Bodleian Quar- terly Record iii (1920–2), 101; Fairer, “Oxford and the Literary World”, pp. 803–4. 39 B. Jowett, MS Letter, cited in E. Venables, “Parsons, John (1761–1819)”, rev. M.C. Curthoys, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2007. 74 chapter two

It is significant that Dibdin gave credit for this response to none other than Cyril Jackson, the Dean of Christ Church, who would be remembered as the mastermind behind the Examination Statute of 1800. “The deputation was not altogether unprepared for such a reply”, wrote Dibdin, “as there had been [in the week since the club had first been proposed] . . . frequent conferences between the Dean of Christ Church and Dr. Wills, and the former was somewhat prone to consider innovation and revolution as synonymous”.40 Undergraduates were themselves aware of the heightened anxiety among senior members following the outbreak of the French Revolu- tion and appear to have resented the stricter disciplinary arrangements and growing lack of trust shown them by their tutors. This situation was of course not helped by the fact that students were becoming, on average, older and tutors, younger, which played its own part in reducing the necessary authoritative distance between tutor and pupil. One Oxford magazine, The Loiterer, edited by James Austen, who had, until just a few years previously been an undergraduate at St John’s, gave this particularly depressing picture of typical tutor-pupil relations at the outbreak of revolution in 1789. With [a] slender stock of knowledge and without any acquaintance with the world or any insight into characters, [the tutor] enters on his office with more zeal than discretion, asserts his own opinions with arrogance and maintains them with obstinacy, calls contradiction, contumacy, and reply, pertness, and deals out his jobations, impositions, and confinements, to every ill-fated junior who is daring enough to oppose his sentiments, or doubt his opinions. The roles of tutor and student appear blurred, even inverted; the students precociously challenge the tutor’s authority while the tutor himself behaves in a petulant and childish manner towards his students. “The consequence of this is perfectly natural”, wrote The Loiterer, “[H]e [the tutor] treats his pupils as boys, and they think him a brute.”41 The editors of the student journal showed a remarkable insight into the motivations behind the recent changes to college curricula and disciplinary arrangements. In particular, they remarked upon the likely aim of encouraging students to focus on the work of ancient historians. “History”, it was thought, “can boast examples at once so powerful to deter from vicious extravagance,

40 T.F. Dibdin, Reminiscences of a Literary Life (London, 1836), pp. 96–7. 41 The Loiterer, p. 358. the new examination statute of 1800 75 and incite to virtuous undertakings.” Through an exposure to these powerful moral examples, undergraduates should “turn in disgust from the short-lived frenzies of a Caligula or a Claudius” and “dwell with repeated rapture on the glorious annals of a Trajan or an Antonine”.42 While it is impossible to work out exactly how many students were actually influenced by radical ideas from France, it is clear that a number certainly were, just as others before them, like William Jones, had been affected by the American Revolution.43 Robert Southey famously expressed his enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause whilst still a freshman at Bal- liol and confessed the view that Oxford studies were deliberately designed to stifle interest in such ideas.44 A more extreme case was that of Walter Savage Landor, a passionate supporter of the French Revolution and an admirer of George Washington, who was sent down from Trinity in 1794 for firing a gun into the rooms of a well-known Tory.45

The New Examination System: The Statutes of 1800, 1807 and 1808

Superficially, the measures contained in the 1800 Statute (above all, the introduction of competitive examinations and the appointment of six public examiners) were explained as representing nothing more than a practical improvement of the traditional system for examining candidates for the BA by regent masters of arts. The former method, we are told, was “very ill adapted to the present times” with greater numbers of students than ever before entering the university.46 Although the minutes of the Hebdomadal Board meetings between 1793 and 1800 are almost entirely lost, a rather different story may still be pieced together from the identity of the statute’s chief framers and a closer look at its central provisions. What it was primarily designed to do, it will be suggested here, was to transfer to the university level the key features of the conservative classical system already developed at Christ Church and some of the other leading colleges. Indeed, all the major provisions of the statute were presaged either in experiments made at the college level in the final thirty

42 The Loiterer, p. 39. 43 See above, p. 51. 44 The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey Vol. I, ed., C.C. Southey (London, 1849), p. 169. 45 L.G. Mitchell, “Politics and Revolution 1772–1800” in Sutherland and Mitchell (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. V, p. 187. 46 Ward and Heywood (eds.), Statutes Vol. I, p. 29. 76 chapter two or forty years of the eighteenth century or in the several over-arching reform schemes published by senior members in the same period. As such, it was intended to be the cornerstone of the Board’s attempts to gain greater control over the reading material and general behaviour of undergraduates. One of the chief framers of the statute was none other than Cyril Jack- son, Dean of Christ Church, whose sensitivity to any attempts by junior members to organize collectively we have already mentioned.47 Since his appointment as Dean in 1783, Jackson had been responsible for an extensive ‘reform’ of the curriculum, examinations and internal discipline of his college, which bore strong similarities to the chief provisions of the 1800 Statute. In particular, he had encouraged an even more intensive study of Oxford’s favourite philosopher, Aristotle, whose prominent role in undergraduate studies following the Statute of 1800 will be discussed shortly. Also of central importance were John Parsons, Master of Balliol (appointed 1798) and John Eveleigh, Provost of Oriel (appointed 1781), who had both introduced similar reforms at their own colleges in the final years of the eighteenth century.48 Eveleigh, in particular, seems to have taken a leading role in the statute’s early development. Edward Copleston credited him with the basic idea of an honours system, claiming he had recommended it for a considerable time before the statute was introduced and had even been prepared to endow such a system generously with his own money. “He may be regarded”, Copleston declared on Eveleigh’s death in 1814, “(if any single man may) as the author and prime mover of that undertaking.”49 Eveleigh, moreover, had expressed concern about what he termed the “adventurous and sceptical philosophy” bred in France and its potential for corrupting Oxford youth in the set of Bampton Lectures he delivered in 1792.50 These men were also the heads of houses closest to Pitt’s Tory ministry in the final years of the eighteenth century.51 Cyril Jackson, for example, took advantage of the need to elect a new university Chancellor to win favour with Pitt by securing the election of the Duke of Portland, whose Whig supporters Pitt was endeavouring to court at the time.52 If the intro-

47 See above, p. 74. 48 J. Jones, Balliol College: A History (Oxford, 1997), p. 177. 49 W.J. Copleston, Memoir of Edward Copleston, D.D. (London, 1851), p. 63. 50 J. Eveleigh, Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, in the Year 1792, at the Lecture Founded by . . . John Bampton, 2nd edition (Oxford, 1794), p. 2. 51 Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates recognizable as such”, p. 156. 52 Mitchell, “Politics and Revolution 1772–1800”, p. 187. the new examination statute of 1800 77 duction of the statute is placed within the context of the ministry’s counter-revolutionary policies in the years after 1789, the idea that its main provisions were designed to serve fundamentally conservative aims is lent considerable strength. Indeed, from the outbreak of the French Revolu- tion, the university had demonstrated its support for the ministry’s robust anti-Jacobin policies. Thus in 1792 Convocation had published an address praising Pitt’s proclamation against seditious publications. From the language of the address, particularly its denunciation of pamphlets spreading ideas which tend “totally to subvert that necessary Subordination which alone can give Strength and Efficacy to Legal Authority”, it is easy to see the connection in the minds of senior members between the subversion of the state and of their own authority within the university.53 From a closer examination of the statute’s provisions, it seems likely that one key aim was to sharpen the distinction between junior and senior members and to bolster the authority of the latter. Central to this was the decision to remove the power of the candidate to choose his own examiners. Instead, six public examiners were to be nominated by the Vice-Chancellor and proctors and then confirmed by Convocation and Congregation.54 This move had been suggested by Napleton in his Con- siderations on the Public Exercises as early as 1773. The new examinations were to be overseen on several occasions by the Vice-Chancellor and the proctors themselves, while in their absence the examiners were to be “fortified with procuratorial authority”.55 This is likewise strongly reminiscent of Vicesimus Knox’s proposal that the senior tutor in every college be invested with the powers of a proctor to strengthen his position. In line with the recommendation of Napleton, examiners were also to receive a respectable annual stipend of £50.56 In addition to enhanced powers, respect for examiners and their authority was also promoted by investing the examinations themselves with greater importance. In particular, a spirit of competition was to be encouraged among the candidates. “The human mind has no greater incentive to the development of its powers and faculties”, declared the statute, “than honourable emulation.”57 This was to be achieved in two ways; firstly by ensuring that a large audience was present. To this end, all

53 Bodl. MS Top. Oxon C. 296, fo. 7. 54 Ward and Heywood, Statutes Vol. I, p. 29. 55 Ibid., 30. 56 Ibid., 35. 57 Ibid., 35. 78 chapter two undergraduates were obliged to attend at least two examinations of their peers;58 secondly, a system of honours was to be instituted, with extraordinary examinations to decide upon the best candidates, whose names would then be listed in order of merit in what essentially amounted to a first and second class.59 The competitive principle was likewise no innovation. Edward Tatham had stressed the need to construct any new system around a spirit of mutual emulation and Napleton had specifically recommended an honours system in 1773. As we saw above, John Eveleigh had also been stressing the need for a similar system for some years before the institution of the 1800 Statute, having experimented with competition in Oriel’s fellowship examinations. Some colleges, such as Trinity in 1789, had already based their own internal examinations on the competitive principle.60 The subjects set for examination were also central to the aim of sharp- ening the distinction between junior and senior members. In line with the recommendations of the various over-arching schemes of reform as well as with internal college examinations, the statute established a uniform syllabus, for the first time, based on the traditional combination of classics and divinity. In the classical syllabus, there was to be absolutely no innovation. Precisely the same subjects and tasks, denounced by critics as little better than school-boy exercises, were retained. Above all, students would be asked to construe passages from at least three classical authors “of the best age and stamp.”61 For both Greek and Latin authors this meant a fairly restricted list of possible texts, confined almost exclusively to the fourth and fifth centuries BCE for Greek authors and the first centuries BCE and CE for Latin authors.62 In addition, they would be quizzed on various aspects of Greek and Latin grammar and asked to translate passages of English into Latin. Although not actually prescribed by name until the Statute of 1807, in practice, Aristotle remained central to the undergraduate syllabus, with questions on rhetoric, logic and moral philosophy almost entirely limited to what could be gleaned from a study

58 Ward and Heywood, Statutes Vol. I, p. 32. 59 Ibid., 35–40. 60 See above, p. 53; for competition in the Oriel fellowship competitions, see S.J. Skedd, “Eveleigh, John (1748–1814)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. 61 Ward and Heywood, Statutes Vol. I, p. 33. 62 For a detailed list of the authors most frequently offered under the New Examination Statute, see [J. Pycroft], The Student’s Guide to a Course of Reading Necessary for Obtaining University Honours (Oxford, 1837). the new examination statute of 1800 79 of his works. Questions on the “elements of divinity” which meant in practice the Greek New Testament and the Thirty-Nine Articles were made a compulsory part of the examination for the first time,63 again paral- leling moves taken at the college level—at Christ Church from the late seventeenth century, but also at other colleges from the early 1770s. Cru- cially, divinity was made the most important requirement of the statute with a poor performance here meaning an automatic failure of the whole examination.64 While W.R. Ward has perceptively described this measure as constituting “Oxford’s great pledge to the counter-revolutionary cause”, the statute as a whole, particularly the curriculum it prescribes, deserves to be seen in this way.65 In accordance with the practice laid down by the Laudian statutes, those subjects considered more dangerous and intellectually challenging—higher-level mathematics and physics, politics and the analytical study of history—were reserved for the MA.66 With the exception of the so-called “Elements of Mathematics and Physics,”67 which referred essentially to the first ten books of Euclid, candidates for the BA had no chance to study those subjects which had formed the staple of the undergraduate curriculum at Cambridge since the middle years of the eighteenth century. In 1807, the Hebdomadal Board took the decision to introduce what it described as a “reformed” Examination Statute. Once again, the need to render the system more appropriate for the present times was stressed; indeed, it received even greater emphasis. “As we already find that some points [in the new examination system] may be altered for the better”, the preamble stated, “(for practice is almost always introducing some novelty, so that what a man deemed the best, he rejects upon experience), the Uni- versity has thought right to re-model the regulation afresh”.68 However, in practice, all the reformed Statute did was to prescribe in even more minute detail the course of study and to increase further the powers of senior members. In particular, the dominant position of classical studies was entrenched. The importance of Aristotle was acknowledged explicitly for the first time. He was hailed as the “master of logic” and his moral and ethical treatises were made a compulsory and central focus of the BA

63 Ward and Heywood, Statutes Vol. I, pp. 33–4. 64 Ibid., 39–40. 65 W.R. Ward, “Jackson, Cyril (1746–1819)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008. 66 Ward and Heywood, Statutes Vol. I, p. 33. 67 Ibid., 33. 68 Ibid., 56. 80 chapter two examination.69 The preference accorded the “rudiments of religion” was reemphasized in still stronger terms. “A defect on that head”, the reformed Statute declared, “cannot be compensated by any other merits of the candidates, be they what they may: so that any person who does not satisfy the examiners on this most momentous subject is to receive no testimo- nial whatsoever”.70 An additional effect of the 1807 Statute was to increase the pressure of competition felt by undergraduates. Instead of listing only the top twelve candidates in order of merit, all those taking the examination were to be classified according to their performance with those achieving honours divided into two separate classes for the first time.71 The degree of supervision exercised by the examiners over candidates was also significantly increased. Although the overall number of examiners was actually reduced from six to four, the new statute ordered that “at every single examination all the examiners should always be present.”72 The 1800 Statute, by contrast, had prescribed the presence of only three of the six examiners.73 Their salary was also raised from £50 to £80 in an effort to imbue the post with greater worth.74 1808 saw further changes to the new system which enabled senior members to regulate the reading material of undergraduates even more thoroughly. The Statute of 1807 had quietly abolished the MA examination, allowing the Hebdomadal Board to concentrate its efforts on increasing the pressure of examinations for undergraduates, who were perceived as representing the greatest threat to senior authority. In 1808, a new examination, called ‘Responsions’, was introduced, to be taken between the sixth and ninth terms after matriculation. It provides yet clearer evidence of the juvenile nature of the syllabus which undergraduates pursued under the new system, as well as the commitment on the part of senior members to ensure that it was followed in the colleges. In particular, candidates were to be tested on their ability to analyse Greek and Latin grammar. At least two classical authors (one Greek, one Latin) “of the best age and reputation” were to be construed “to the accurate standard of grammar”.75 The ability to translate from English into Latin was also to be tested.

69 Ward and Heywood, Statutes Vol. I, p. 63. 70 Ibid., 62. 71 Ibid., 64–65. 72 Ibid., 58. 73 Ibid., 30. 74 Ibid., 67. 75 Ibid., 79. the new examination statute of 1800 81

In addition, candidates were to demonstrate familiarity with “the rudiments of logic, and Euclid’s elements of geometry”.76 What is perhaps most noteworthy about the requirements for Responsions is their strong similarity to those for the final examination.77 While the workload for the BA examination was significantly higher, with the exception of divinity, which was not required in Responsions, there was very little difference between the two examinations with regard to the kind of knowledge tested. It seems reasonable to interpret this as further evidence of a desire on the part of the statute’s framers to circumscribe carefully the ideas to which undergraduates were exposed in the course of their university careers.

The Reception of the New System

Further evidence of the conservative motivations behind the new statutes may be found in what was said about them in the years after their introduction. Significantly, both supporters and critics interpreted them as an attempt by the Oxford authorities to increase their control over junior members. A few months after the Statute of 1800 was passed, the Whig divine, Samuel Parr, expressed the hope that “amidst the rapid decay of similar institutions in foreign countries,” Oxford would now constitute one of “the main pillars, not only of the learning and perhaps the science, but of the virtue and piety . . . which yet remain among us.”78 “J.M.”, the writer of an article in the British Magazine reviewing the changes agreed. “We have witnessed”, he wrote, “a gradual progress in the learned upon the continent towards those principles, which by being secretly and extensively disseminated, and at length by being openly avowed and acted upon, have filled the world with its present miseries.” The English nation, he declared, “in such an exigency calls with a far more earnest and authoritative voice upon her public seminaries of learning . . . It is high time to think of laying some restraint upon the profligacy which will always be found among young men who are too much their own masters”.

76 Ward and Heywood, Statutes Vol. I, p. 79. 77 Once again, as in the final examination, students were obliged to attend at least one set of Responsions before they underwent the trial themselves in order to increase the seriousness with which they viewed the examination. 78 S. Parr, A Spital Sermon, Preached at Christ Church, upon Easter Tuesday, April 15, 1800 (London, 1800), p. 112. 82 chapter two

“No method”, he concluded of the 1800 Statute, “[could] be more effectual for the accomplishment of this end.”79 In 1802, William Barrow, the Master of the academy in Soho Square, London and a graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford, praised the statute similarly for its ability to ensure a greater degree of obedience in undergraduates.80 In particular, he commended the decision to restrict the curriculum to a narrow range of classical texts similar to those studied at school. “When boys are treated as men”, he observed, “the vices of men are naturally encouraged.”81 When the “fashionable doctrines of equality and independence” are taught instead of obedience to lawful authority, as in revolutionary France, “that reverence . . . felt by youth . . . for men exalted by their years, their experience, or their dignity” is irretrievably lost.82 Far better that through a profound study of the classics, particularly Aristotelian logic, “the rising generation . . . amidst the decay and downfall of the academical establishments on the continent, may learn to resist and refute the metaphysical subtleties which have thrown half the nations of Europe into confusion.”83 In a time of crisis, it was precisely the schoolmaster’s policy of carefully selecting texts for the moral and political lessons they could teach which was needed at the English universities. “The choice of books”, he wrote, “may . . . be directed by the circumstances of the times; by the military or political transactions, in which our own or foreign nations happen to be engaged.”84 The particular context of the French Revolution, for example, made especially pertinent the reading of “the history of Cataline’s Conspiracy in Sallust, and the Orations of Cicero on the subject”.85 As we saw in the previous chapter, these two texts had been among the most prominent in the reading lists of a number of leading colleges in the last years of the eighteenth century.86 Significantly, critics of the new system saw precisely the same conservative motivations behind its introduction. What Barrow and others had praised as education correctly tailored for young men, not yet fully

79 ‘J.M.’, “The proposed regulations in the University of Oxford”, British Magazine i (1800), 425–7. 80 W. Barrow, An Essay on Education Vol. II (London, 1802), p. 329. 81 Ibid., 253. 82 Ibid., 252. 83 Ibid., 308. 84 W. Barrow, An Essay on Education Vol. I (London, 1804), p. 331. 85 Ibid., 332. 86 See above, p. 55. the new examination statute of 1800 83 mature, hostile commentators condemned as unnecessarily childish, borne out of a simple fear of new ideas. The passage of the reformed Stat- ute in 1807 and the further narrowing of the curriculum which it introduced saw such criticism grow substantially. Particularly harsh were the comments of Edward Tatham, Rector of Lincoln College since 1792. As we saw above, he had for a time been supportive of the conservative aims of the 1800 Statute against the specific background of the French Revolution.87 However, he felt that the danger of undergraduates being seduced by radical ideas had receded considerably by 1807. As a member of the Hebdomadal Board, he had fought hard to prevent the passage of the 1807 Statute which he saw as unnecessarily restrictive. In a number of emotional Addresses to Convocation between 1807 and 1811, he condemned the failure of the statute’s framers to make any provision for modern learning and their determination to keep undergraduates in “the dark ages.”88 He exposed what he saw as the hypocrisy of the statute’s preamble, promising to adapt the university’s curriculum and examination system to the modern world. “[T]hough this New Form of a Statute sets out with these promising expressions”, he wrote, “it turns out . . . to be a thing, in all the most important parts, patched and tinkered up out of the rubbish of the Old Discipline of the Schools, without any regard whatever to the Advancement of Learning and Knowledge of these present times.”89 Writing in 1810, Henry Home Drummond, a graduate of Corpus Christi College, condemned the “narrow and illiberal views of education” contained in the reformed Statute and feared that if implemented, they “would make the University a school”. “It is in some instances too much of a school already”, he complained.90 Tatham likewise determined to expose the childishness of the prescribed curriculum. His bitterest criticism was reserved for the decision to strengthen the dominance of Aristotelian logic and philosophy in 1807. Although he had seen some value in Aristotle in the context of the crisis of the 1790s, by 1807 he had returned to the position he had outlined

87 See above, pp. 68–9. 88 E. Tatham, An Address to the Members of Convocation at Large on the Proposed Stat- ute of Examination, Jan. 14th 1807 (Oxford, 1807), p. 2. 89 Ibid., 5–6. 90 H. Home Drummond, Observations Suggested by the Strictures of the Edinburgh Review upon Oxford and by the two Replies Containing Some Account of the Late Changes in that University (Edinburgh, 1810), pp. 23–24. 84 chapter two nearly twenty years previously in The Chart and Scale of Truth.91 By insisting on Aristotle as “the master of logic”, he declared, the statute’s framers mistook the “real minority . . . of the world” for its “seniority or Antiquity”.92 In his Third Address, published in February 1807, he explained this charge at length paraphrasing liberally from the first book of Bacon’s Novum Orga- num, whose author he credited with the idea. “This Antiquity”, he wrote, “which the Schoolmen venerate and esteem as containing the maturity of learning, I consider only as containing the ignorance and immaturity of its youth: for the world was then young, and is now old; and, as it grew in years, it grew in learning of one kind or another.”93 An article by John Playfair which appeared less than a year later in the Edinburgh Review made a strikingly similar charge against the current Oxford system with particular reference to the lack of proper mathematical training. At Oxford, he wrote, where “the dictates of Aristotle are still listened to as infallible decrees, and where the infancy of science is mistaken for its maturity, the mathematical sciences have never flourished; and the scholar has no means of advancing beyond the mere elements of geometry”.94 The reformed Statute’s continued emphasis on Greek and Latin grammar met with equally harsh criticism. Such was the importance of school- boy activities like construing that Tatham claimed the curriculum “would not only have disgraced a dissenting academy, or a provincial institution,

91 See above, pp. 67–8. 92 E. Tatham, A Letter to the Rev. the Dean of Christ-Church Respecting the New Statute Upon Public Examination to which is added a Third Address to the Members of Convocation on the Same Subject by the Rector of Lincoln College (Oxford, 1807), p. 7. 93 Ibid., 15. See F. Bacon, Novum Organum: True Directions Concerning the Interpreta- tion of Nature (Kessinger Publishing Co., 2004), pp. 31–32: “The opinion which men cherish of antiquity is altogether idle, and scarcely accords with the term. For the old age and increasing years of the world should in reality be considered as antiquity, and this is rather the character of our own times than of the less advanced age of the world in those of the ancients. For the latter, with respect to ourselves, are ancient and elder, with respect to the world, modern and younger. And as we expect a greater knowledge of human affairs and more mature judgment from an old man, than from a youth, on account of his experience, and the variety and number of things he has seen, heard, and meditated upon: so we have reason to expect much greater things of our own age (if it knew but its strength and would essay and exert it) than from antiquity, since the world has grown older, and its stock has been increased and accumulated with an infinite number of experiments and observations.” Tatham had first cited Bacon to declare Aristotelian philosophy “the infancy of the world” in The Chart and Scale of Truth Vol. I, p. 318. 94 [J. Playfair], “Traité de Méchanique Céleste. Par P.S. La Place”, Edinburgh Review 11:22 (January 1808), 283. the new examination statute of 1800 85 but [was] such as a country-schoolmaster would have spurned”.95 More- over, he argued, the standard achieved was so low that it often fell below what could reasonably be expected at a decent grammar school. “The Greek tongue”, he declared, in the first of a second series of Addresses to Convocation in 1810, “is imperfectly read, and ill understood in the Uni- versity of Oxford. The authors are read by the help of translations; and construed only by the help of memory alone. And this is the Classical Learning which forms a considerable part of the boast of our New Exami- nations.” “Is the University of Oxford”, he asked, “. . . to continue a Univer- sity, the seat and patroness of Universal Learning?—Or, is it to dwindle into a collection of private schools?”96 In October 1809, Sydney Smith, a former fellow of New College, complained in the Edinburgh Review that tutors at Oxford continued to “bring up the first young men of the country as if they were all to keep grammar schools in little country towns”.97 When criticizing the new Oxford edition of Strabo in the same journal in July 1809, Richard Payne Knight intimated that “the schoolboys of all Europe” possessed a greater store of classical learning than Oxford undergraduates.98 He concluded that the quality of the Latin in the edition of Strabo was so appalling that it deserved to constitute a dialect of its own which he named “Oxonian”. The edition contained, he claimed, speci- mens of composition “such as those of our readers, who are not employed in the education of very young children, have seldom had the misfortune to meet with”.99 Edward Ward, a graduate of Cambridge, made Oxford’s insistence on school-boy grammar one of the central targets of his satirical composition of 1812, Oxoniana, a Didactic Poem in several letters on the Late Improved Mode of Study and Examination for Degrees in the University of Oxford. Addressing a young undergraduate friend at Christ Church, he cautioned thus:

95 E. Tatham, An Address to the Right Hon. Lord Grenville, Chancellor of the University of Oxford upon Great and Fundamental Abuses in that University by the Rector of Lincoln College (Oxford, 1811), p. 15. 96 E. Tatham, A New Address to the Free and Independent Members of Convocation. By the Rector of Lincoln College (Oxford, 1810), pp. 18–19. 97 [S. Smith], “Edgeworth’s Professional Education”, Edinburgh Review 15:29 (October 1809), 50. 98 [R. Payne Knight], “The Oxford Edition of Strabo”, Edinburgh Review 14:28 (July 1809), p. 431. 99 Ibid., 433. 86 chapter two

Though Grecian metres charm your Classic ear, And your full mind with old Language loves to cheer Of syllables nor make a wanton waste, If short, or long, approves corrected taste. If Αρσιν, Θεσιν, be inflective dress By which you soft harmonious speech express. For Grammar-boys, such labours best use find, To drive in gradual wedges to the mind;100 The continuing prominence of verse composition, considered by many to be a particularly puerile practice, also aroused considerable anger. An anonymous writer for the Edinburgh Annual Register in 1809 lamented the fact that electors for Oxford scholarships were “bound by their oaths to require the composition of Latin verse as an indispensable qualification”. “[They] may be thus constrained”, he continued, “to admit an ignorant and stupid boy, who has been flogged into the practice, in preference to another in all respects his superior.”101 Sydney Smith launched an equally stinging attack upon the popularity of versification at Oxford. In his opinion, the practice was not even worthy of the higher forms of public schools which, he felt, should already be engaging in studies which would prepare boys for the more demanding requirements of the university. “The prodigious honour in which Latin verses are held at public schools”, he declared, “is surely the most absurd of all absurd distinctions”; it is the “reason why boys, who make a very considerable figure at school, so very often make no figure in the world;—and why other lads, who are passed over without notice, turn out to be valuable and important men”.102 Those dissatisfied with the curriculum prescribed under the new system offered their own alternative proposals. For Edward Tatham and the Edinburgh Reviewers, the whole notion of an Oxford education needed to be reconceptualized. From a system designed, in their minds, to produce nothing but superannuated school boys, a new scheme, intended (as Sydney Smith put it) to stimulate the “solid and masculine parts” of the understanding needed to take its place.103 Above all, they believed that Bacon ought to replace Aristotle as the favourite philosopher of the Schools; moreover that the study of modern philosophy should begin as

100 E.M. Ward, Oxoniana, a didactic poem in several letters on the late improved mode of study and Examination for Degrees in the University of Oxford (London, 1812), p. 14. 101 “State of the University of Oxford in 1809”, Edinburgh Annual Register 2 (January 1809), 405. 102 [Smith], “Essays on Professional Education”, 48. 103 Ibid., 49. the new examination statute of 1800 87 soon as young men started upon their undergraduate careers. For Sydney Smith, Aristotle’s treatises were of use only to teach school boys the rudiments of the Greek language; thereafter all contact with him should cease. “When we have got upon the shoulders of the ancients”, he declared, “we must look over their heads . . . The man who forgets the friends of his childhood in real life is base; but he who clings to the props of his childhood in literature, must be content to remain as ignorant as he was when a child.”104 Tatham was equally keen that Bacon’s Novum Organum, “properly edited and adapted to the study of young men”,105 should be introduced into university education as early as possible, even if it meant raising the matriculation age further so that undergraduates would be mature enough to cope with it. “An Academical Education”, he declared in his Fifth Address to Convocation, “should not . . . commence till . . . Reason becomes vigorous and strong, Invention fertile, Imagination vivid, and Memory retentive.”106 This argument, of course, ignored the concerns of many of Oxford’s senior members that older students would be more headstrong and therefore more likely to rebel against established authority. Other critics adopted a more graduated approach in which the works of modern philosophers like Bacon and Newton would constitute the ultimate end of university education rather than its beginning. Thus, Henry Home Drummond condemned what he considered the “precocious” system advocated by the Edinburgh Reviewers.107 The first years of an Oxford degree, he maintained, should be spent acquiring the “habits of accurate investigation, and of industrious research” necessary before “plunging the untutored mind at once into the depths of metaphysics and political economy”.108 Bacon, he suggested, should therefore be introduced as part of a reformed MA examination “when the maturity of reason shall be enabled to separate the wheat from the chaff ”.109 Furthermore, Drum- mond thought that Oxford’s traditional training in classical languages was ideal to help develop the minds of undergraduates sufficiently to tackle the rigours of Bacon as bachelors. Challenging the Edinburgh Reviewers, he asked, “is there no advantage in the accurate habits of attention and memory and judgment, which such an occupation requires? Or rather,

104 [Smith], “Essays on Professional Education”, 43. 105 E. Tatham, A Fifth Address to Free and Independent Members of Convocation (Oxford, 1808), p. 8. 106 Ibid., 6–7. 107 Drummond, Observations, p. 19. 108 Ibid., 8. 109 Ibid., 62, 8. 88 chapter two

I would ask, is there . . . any better discipline, by which the faculties may be matured for the more important researches of philosophy?”110 The Edinburgh Reviewers had not, however, dismissed all aspects of classical learning out of hand. They had indeed wholly condemned the minutiae of grammatical training and the niceties of Greek and Latin versification; however, “[t]here are”, Sydney Smith confessed, “profound investigations, and subjects quite powerful enough for any understanding, to be met with in classical literature”; in particular, he mentioned the critical study of ancient history, where undergraduates would be encouraged to debate the rights and wrongs of Greek and Roman politics.111 However, this was simply not possible at Oxford. In his review of the Oxford edition of Strabo, Richard Payne Knight wrote similarly in favour of the study of ancient rhetoric; however, he stressed, it should not be consulted merely as a grammar aid or a means to improve taste. It should be used to train the embryo politician, to render him useful to his country. “Eloquence”, he declared, “is the principal medium of government, and the most direct and honourable road to rank, power and reputation.”112

The Spectre of Junior Rebellion

However, it was not simply the conservative nature of the ‘new’ system which concerned critics. Although designed to strengthen the authority of senior members, many feared that the narrow curriculum, particularly after the further tightening in 1807, might actually provoke undergraduates to rebellion. The attempt of its framers to stave off an intergenerational struggle in the university had “proved abortive in practice”, wrote Tatham, for their “scheme of Public Education” had “met, in the midst of so many honours it affected to confer, with . . . contempt from all the best qualified and most distinguishing young men” among the candidates.113 In his Third Address to Convocation, Tatham declared the 1807 Statute to mark an all-time low in the relations between the university’s junior and senior members. Instead of a mature and healthy communication, the quality of interaction between the two groups had degenerated into something akin

110 Drummond, Observations, pp. 80–81. 111 [Smith], “Edgeworth’s Professional Education”, 48. 112 [Payne Knight], “The Oxford Edition of Strabo”, 430. 113 Tatham, Address to the Members of Convocation at Large, p. 4. the new examination statute of 1800 89 to that between school-masters and their pupils, a relationship essentially based on fear. The new system of Examination, he wrote, is entirely against the Examinee; whereas it should be entirely in his favour. The line to be pursued should be clearly drawn; that the young-men may distinctly know what they have to do . . . [T]he Examinee . . . should be encouraged and led on by a generous spirit of Emulation, and not goaded on by the illiberal dread of being pluckt.114 He believed that this deterioration in relations between juniors and seniors had the potential to determine the very survival of the university’s reputation in the modern world. “The present is a contest”, he declared, in the commencement of the nineteenth century, between the Schoolman and the Scholar; to try and determine—Whether this famous University is to be thrown back into all ignorance, sophistry, and dogmatism of the dark ages past: Or, to advance with the luminous discoveries and philosophical science of the advancing age, improving and to be improved.115 Writing three years later in 1810, it seemed clear to Tatham that the moral advantage in this contest had shifted even more decisively in favour of the juniors and the advocates of modern learning. This was, he thought, entirely due to the childish and hypocritical behaviour of senior members, including the Vice-Chancellor, John Parsons. By repeatedly scheduling meetings of the Hebdomadal Board with no regard for the statutable time and place, in an attempt, Tatham concluded, to exclude him from their discussions, he was continually in breach of his own statutes. “After having himself infringed the most important statute in the book which relates to himself and continuing in weekly violation of it, how”, Tatham asked, “can he expect that the junior members of the University, consisting of generous youths full of high blood and spirits, will strictly obey the Stat- utes which relate to them?” More significantly, he claimed, by sanction- ing such illegal actions, the Hebdomadal Board and the senior members of the university in general had lost all credibility with the juniors. With traditional lines of authority blurred as never before, the whole Oxford system was rendered more vulnerable to attack from below. “With what countenance”, asked Tatham referring to the Vice-Chancellor, “can he by himself, or his Assessor, sit in judgment upon them? And, above all, with what conscience can he proceed to punish them?”116

114 Tatham, A Letter to the Reverend the Dean of Christ-Church, p. 33. 115 Ibid., 34. 116 Tatham, A New Address, p. 12. 90 chapter two

Clearly Tatham did not want to see the authority of the Hebdomadal Board destroyed (after all, he had been a member of it for some twenty years); his comments about the damage done to the Vice-Chancellor’s authority and to junior-senior relations more broadly were intended as a warning to his colleagues of what might happen if better reforms were not introduced and speedily. Indeed, Tatham was keen to establish his anti-revolutionary principles in the various Addresses and reminded his readers of the similar warnings he had given some twenty years previously. “At the crisis of the French Revolution when the whole Nation was under a dreadful alarm from the contagion of democratical principles of the basest kind, . . . what pen”, he asked, “was employed in all this place except my own, in public letters to Mr. Burke, and to Mr. Pitt, and in a public Sermon published in many of the Churches of Oxford, and distributed gratis through all the neighbouring towns?”117 Nor was Tatham alone in attempting to warn the Hebdomadal Board about the potentially dangerous consequences of the reformed Statute. Henry Home Drummond argued that it had only made worse the most disagreeable aspects of Oxford’s pre-1800 system. The study of modern philosophy, he maintained, was more actively discouraged than before and “the officious anxiety with which [the university] regulated every minute particular that was to be spoken or to be heard in the whole course of Academical Discipline” had been magnified.118 This heightened fear of student dissent on the part of senior members was also picked up by Sydney Smith in his Edinburgh Review article of October 1809. “A genuine Oxford tutor”, he wrote, “would shudder to hear his young men disputing upon moral and political truth, forming and pulling down themes, and indulging in all the boldness of youthful discussion. He would augur nothing from it, but impiety to God, and treason to kings.”119 Edward Ward, mean- while, concluded that the frustration and disappointment felt by many undergraduates when confronted with the childish curriculum turned a considerable portion each year into lawless ruffians, who, like the young man in the following passage, ran rampage through the university: Wheeling in circles round Oxonia’s ring Bang up to Blenheim, appetite to bring, With noise, and oaths, and nonsense push’d about,

117 Tatham, An Address to the Right Hon. Lord Grenville, p. 33. 118 Drummond, Observations, pp. 58–59. 119 [Smith], “Essays on Professional Education”, 50. the new examination statute of 1800 91

Whence Wit, in cunning Punster’s shape peeps out, Fresh, as he terms it, is he stagg’ring seen, And Wine, and Wantons close the hickupt scene. Like Tatham, Ward implored the university’s senior members to confront the problem urgently lest the situation degenerate further: And must the Goths, the Vandals of our day In noisy nonsense bear ungovern’d sway [?] . . . To Renegados foul who thus distort Whate’er is lovely and of good report . . . Ye Masters, Tutors, Lecturers arise, Jealous of honour,—as ye justice prize . . .120 Ward was keen to show that the potential consequences of failing to reform abuses, made worse by the Statute of 1807, were likely to be dire. His worst fear was that non-conformist radicals would take control of the (as yet) undirected antipathy of junior members and lead a full-scale rebellion against the university authorities: When laden by their sins they bode no fear Since visionary saints their prospects cheer. And Jesus, hand in hand, and cheek by jowl, Pours drops of brandy into Sinner’s soul; Thus Spirit-renovated, they exhale Crude eructations, indigested, stale, By Faith fanatical exploding LAW Good Antinomial BILLS of rights they draw Endors’d Predestinators, by their head Calvin! No sleeping power in the trade . . . And Fallen-angel like, [they] mix debate Headstrong Free-will with dark Predestined Fate Nor know one virtue of the Golden Mean.121 In language reminiscent of Tatham’s ideal examination scheme in which candidates were spurred on by a “generous spirit of emulation” rather than the rod of awe, Ward offered the framers of the reformed Statute the example of his own university, Cambridge, as a model for Oxford. At Cambridge, he argued, undergraduates were expected to work hard to acquire an intimate knowledge of modern science, in particular mathematics and Newtonian philosophy; and when they had demonstrated their

120 Ward, Oxoniana, pp. 21–3. 121 Ibid., 27–8. 92 chapter two achievement satisfactorily in carefully ordered public examinations, they were rewarded with coveted honours degrees and college fellowships: Unable social pleasure to enjoy, Whilst study cramps their every hour’s employ. . . . Them Venere et Vino free remain, Such stimulants much injure studious brain. . . . Hence studious Soph maintains his learn’d debate, Preserving in the Schools collected state. Respondent Him no terrors now assail, As he delivers thesis in detail; And Newton Latinized most knowing scans, In Curves how Planets form adjusted plans. . . . The lazy lubber proud of Founder’s Kin, Her learned Walls CAM ne’er receives within; Facilities of Fellowships abound, High Wranglers to detain on College ground.122

The University’s Response to its Critics

The reaction of the university to these criticisms likewise betrays a clear sense of anxiety about the possibility of student rebellion. The most immediate and vicious response was given to the first series of three Addresses by Edward Tatham, who, as a college head and member of the Hebdomadal Board, was seen by many of his colleagues as the worst kind of traitor. It was his claim that he had sought to avert the spectre of intergenerational conflict at Oxford; yet, this was precisely what his opponents within the university accused him of fostering. Indeed, a protest which appeared in 1807 in the form of a letter, signed with the pseudonym, ‘Philalethes’, took this as its central charge; in particular, the author condemned Tatham’s decision to speak directly to Oxford’s junior members in his first Address published in January 1807.123 “Indeed, Sir”, he chided, “you have derogated from your own dignity, and reduced yourself beneath your own scholars by your imprudent, and I may say absurd, address to them contained in your first pamphlet.” “For is not this to pursue the same plan”, he continued,

122 Ward, Oxoniana, pp. 78–80; Tatham, (An Address to the Members of Convocation at Large, pp. 2–3) also proposed the examination system at Cambridge as a ‘fit model’ for Oxford to emulate. 123 Tatham, An Address to the Members of Convocation at Large, p. 10ff: “Ye generous youths” and p. 12ff. “O florentissimi Juvenes!” the new examination statute of 1800 93

which the assertors of popular government have adopted; viz to make the people judges in their own cause, to make them the fountain of all law, right, and property, in short, to convert the governed into governors? By what right are the young men to decide upon the present question? Are they on an equality with the Heads of Houses? Are they framers of the Stat- utes? Are they members of Convocation? Indeed, in my humble opinion, such an address is actually inciting them to discontent, and complaints little short of rebellion against their tutors and guardians; and most undoubtedly militates against one of the Statutes “de reverentia Juniorum erga Seniores”, from the disregard of which they are guilty of perjury, according to the oath administered at their matriculation.124 By addressing the juniors directly, Tatham no doubt reminded his fellow heads of the letters written by Joseph Priestley to undergraduates in the 1780s and 1790s encouraging them to disobey their tutors and refuse to subscribe the Thirty-Nine Articles.125 An official reprimand from the Hebdomadal Board following Tatham’s New Address of 1810 accused him similarly of “tending to create Divisions in the University, to injure its Dis- cipline, and to degrade its Character”.126 So damaging did they consider the charges made in his pamphlets, they informed Tatham that they were seeking legal advice about having him prosecuted for libel.127 The university’s response to the attacks in the Edinburgh Review took the form of a much longer and more carefully-considered series of pamphlets written by Edward Copleston, then a tutor at Oriel and Professor of Poetry. His Replies, which attempted to vindicate both the manliness and usefulness of the system introduced in 1800, have usually been treated as evidence of a genuine desire for reform at Oxford in the early years of the nineteenth century. Typical are the comments of D.W. Rannie, who described Copleston as “a reformer, indeed . . . from the first”, “a man quick with the spirit of his age”.128 It is true that as an undergraduate Copleston had been a member of that very Society for Scientific and Literary Disqui- sition which in 1795 had been forbidden from meeting by the then Vice- Chancellor, John Wills129 and that he was a prominent early member of the liberal group of Anglican clergyman at Oxford, known as the Noetics. Even Sheldon Rothblatt, who has done more than most to suggest the

124 ‘Philalethes’, A Letter to the Rector of Lincoln College (Oxford, 1807), pp. 4–5. 125 See above, pp. 69–70. 126 Tatham, An Address to the Right Hon. Lord Grenville, p. 23. 127 Ibid., 24. 128 D.W. Rannie, Oriel College (London, 1900), pp. 165–6. 129 N.I. White, Shelley (New York, 1972), p. 113. For details of the society, see above, pp. 73–4. 94 chapter two existence of conservative motivations behind the 1800 Statute, has argued that Copleston’s Replies mark an important turning-point in the university’s attitude towards reform. They saw the emergence, he wrote, of “a new working principle,”130 of “an effort to keep up with the times”. “It was the theme of the independent student who must not be treated as if he were merely a boy at school”, but rather as “having entered young manhood and as being at an age when his judgment and discretion were beginning to form. Too much regulation will suppress his initiative, hinder his development and delay a desired progress towards maturity.”131 It is true that when attempting to refute the accusations of the Edin- burgh Review, Copleston took pains to paint a convincing picture of Oxford studies as a carefully thought out scheme designed to provide a “mature” and “manly” education. To do this he employed the same kind of language used to justify the changes made at Cambridge in the early and middle years of the eighteenth century.132 He flatly denied that the primary aim of the Statutes of 1800 and 1807 had been to provide senior members with a greater degree of control over undergraduates. “Nothing seems less understood, or more industriously misrepresented”, he claimed, “than the course of studies, which this University reformed and settled some years ago, and which is now pursued even more rigorously than at the time of its first institution.”133 Following the Statute of 1807, Oxford’s curriculum and examination system, he wrote, offered “a manly and generous discipline”; a discipline which did not treat its undergraduates as school boys (as Oxford had so often been accused of doing), but rather as young men who were completing the transition to manhood. “In the first stages of infancy and boyhood”, he wrote, restraint must be continually practiced, and liberty of action abridged. But, in proportion as reason is strengthened, freedom should be extended . . . On this principle I rejoice to see a manly and generous discipline established among us—a discipline which enjoins nothing, which prohibits nothing, which punishes nothing, but what reason and common sense declare deserving of the treatment . . . [I]n all the great business of education, the student feels that what he does is his own doing; the free working of his own will; assisted certainly by counsel, by reproof, and by encouragement;

130 Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates recognizable as such”, p. 157. 131 Ibid., 145. 132 See above, pp. 26–7. 133 [E. Copleston], A Reply to the Calumnies of the Edinburgh Review Against Oxford: Containing an Account of Studies Pursued in that University (Oxford, 1810), p. 136. the new examination statute of 1800 95

but springing principally from his own sense of what is fitting, virtuous, and honourable.134 The same idea is found in Copleston’s famous student-plant metaphor, which Rothblatt felt to characterize the new approach particularly well.135 Contrasting the Oxford system with continental models of higher education, Copleston wrote: “We want not men who are clipped and espaliered into any form which the whim of the gardener may dictate, or the narrow limits of his parterre require. Let our saplings take their full spread, and send forth their vigorous shoots in all the boldness and variety of nature.” “Education” should not, he declared, be “one continued system of restraint, of artificial guidance, and over-ruling inspection.”136 He also stressed that the higher branches of natural science and mathematics were not unduly neglected at Oxford. In particular, he mentioned the regular provision of lectures for undergraduates by the professors of natural philosophy, astronomy, chemistry, mineralogy, botany and anatomy.137 If purely this side of the Replies is examined, then it is easy to see Copleston as a supporter of modernizing reform. However, on closer inspection, the same internal contradiction is revealed as was apparent in the statutes themselves between the claim to represent an attempt to adapt the system to the present times, on the one hand, and the deeply conservative content of the prescribed curriculum, on the other. While it is true that Copleston made significant use of the language of “manliness” and of mental “growth” and “exercise” which had been instrumental in selling the shift towards mathematics and Newtonian physics at Cam- bridge, he applied it to precisely those classical texts which had formed the basis of the Oxford curriculum for centuries. In particular, he was keen to establish Aristotle’s reputation as the “manly” philosopher par excel- lence138 and to offer himself as an example of the kind of “manly reasoner” produced by the university’s traditional classical syllabus.139 According to Copleston, the syllogistic logic of Aristotle developed the mind of the undergraduate more successfully than anything else. It is “the grammar of reasoning by means of words”, he wrote, and “the necessary foundation on

134 Rothblatt, The Modern University and its Discontents, pp. 158–9. 135 Ibid., 157. 136 Ibid., 157. 137 Ibid., 132, 154. 138 [Copleston], A Reply, p. 29. 139 Ibid., 2. 96 chapter two which every solid intellectual fabric must be raised”.140 In addition, Aris- totle taught students the importance of moderation, through his emphasis on virtue lying in the mean between two vicious extremes.141 The Ethics and Rhetoric of Aristotle were “best calculated perhaps of any single works for bringing into play all the energies of the intellect”, unrivalled as they are in “the precision of the language, the close connection of the reasoning, the enlarged philosophical views, and the immense store of principles and maxims which they contain”.142 As ‘reformed’ by the Statute of 1807, Copleston argued, the university’s classical curriculum offered the perfect training of the mind and morals for the challenges of manhood. “Without directly qualifying a man for any of the employments of life”, he wrote, “it enriches and ennobles all”; it is “a main ingredient in that complete and generous education, which fits a man “to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.”143 Avoiding the limiting effects of specialization, it “expands and enlarges the mind, excites its faculties, and calls those limbs and muscles into freer exercise, which, by too constant use in one direction, not only acquire an illiberal air, but are also apt to lose somewhat of their native play and energy”.144 The texts he proceeded to list in detail as being those most often selected by tutors for their pupils to read under the new system were precisely those which had been purposely preferred in college curricula from the middle of the eighteenth century in an effort to prevent the exposure of undergraduates to dangerous ideas. We see the same bias towards the works of ancient historians and orators, particularly in Copleston’s description of the new examination, Responsions. Xenophon, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Sallust, Livy and Cicero dominate the list of texts most frequently read for this examination, with the poetical favourites of the schoolroom, Virgil and Horace, following closely behind.145 Strikingly, although more texts were to be offered, these are precisely the same authors who predominate in the lists for the final BA examination. If new writers appeared, they most

140 [Copleston], A Second Reply to the Edinburgh Review (Oxford, 1810), p. 9. 141 Copleston, A Reply, pp. 109, 130. 142 Ibid., 140–1. 143 Ibid., 112. 144 Ibid., 111–12. 145 Ibid., 139. the new examination statute of 1800 97 often represented more of the same: for the historians, Thucydides and Tacitus; and for the orators, Quintilian.146 Many critics were simply unable to accept the combination of such a carefully-selected (and, as many saw it, childish) syllabus with a theory of education which stressed the importance of allowing the student as much independence as possible. “The author seems from the outset”, wrote the Edinburgh Reviewers in their answer to Copleston, to have chosen very unskilfully the ground on which his stand was to be made. In the warfare of the pen, no less than of the sword, it is a great error to attempt defending a place which is untenable, and from which, in spite of every effort, you must be forced to retire with loss.147 In such a system, an Oxford education cannot be said to promote free and independent thought, they declared. The epithet “free” could only be “applied to schools, where there are no statutes to prolong the dominions of error,—no salaries to reward sloth and inactivity,—and no officers led by duty or interest to refuse admission to the truth”.148 They demanded likewise that Copleston produce hard proof to support his claim that lectures attended by undergraduates were offered in all the major sciences. They challenged him to produce a list of the lectures actually read, in which subjects, and how many students regularly attended them. “If [his claim] is good”, they wrote, “the Reviewers are better answered than by any abuse; if it is not, he may be as eloquent as he pleases about watering pupils: he will do no good, and had better be quiet.”149 The task of reconciling these two aspects of the Replies is made even more difficult by the fact that as rhetorical compositions designed to vindicate the “manly” character of the Oxford system, they are far less internally cohesive than has often been thought. Most historians have argued that Copleston had by far the greater success in his literary duel with the Edinburgh Reviewers. However, there is a deep and persistent contradiction running through the Replies. The text may be punctuated with claims that an Oxford education under the reformed system was committed to allowing undergraduates as much freedom as possible; yet, there are also many places where one can trace an equally strong counter-discourse

146 [Copleston], A Reply, pp. 141–2. The only other new authors mentioned by Copleston are Pindar and Aristophanes for the Greek and Lucretius and Juvenal for the Latin. 147 [R. Payne Knight, J. Playfair and S. Smith], “Calumnies Against Oxford”, Edinburgh Review 16 (April 1810), 168–9. 148 Ibid., 168. 149 Ibid., 187. 98 chapter two emphasizing the necessity of a much stricter system of discipline designed to monitor students closely and, above all, to prevent disruptive and rebellious behaviour. “Constant admonition, the consciousness of an oversee- ing eye, the fear of reproof, and the hope of praise”, wrote Copleston in one place, “are . . . necessary to overcome the desultory habits of youth, to check its wanderings, and keep it to its purpose.”150 On a number of occasions, he also recommended enthusiastically the policy of carefully selecting the works read by undergraduates in order to filter the ideas to which they were exposed. In one place, for example, he summed up the approach of the whole course of studies as follows: “It is for us to execute an established system; to teach and to recommend what is thoroughly approved.”151 In justifying the requirement that undergraduates be examined in the Thirty-Nine Articles and certain approved defences of the Anglican confession, Copleston repeated precisely the conservative position we heard from those advocating more intensive divinity instruction in the late years of the eighteenth century: The scheme of Revelation we think is closed, and we expect no new light on earth to break in upon us. The sacred volume we know has been abused . . . for the worst and wicked ends . . . and these acts of violence we hold it our especial duty to remedy and to guard against; to keep strict watch round that sacred citadel, to deliver out in due measure and season the stores it contains, to make our countrymen look to it as a tower of strength, and to defend it against open and secret enemies.152 He was equally clear in his support for the idea that undergraduates should read particular classical texts for the moral and political values they had to teach. “In the favourite studies of the place”, he declared, students meet with nothing but what tends to breed and foster . . . noble sentiments, to make them feel what they owe to their country in a land of freedom, and what their country expects from them. In the histories of Thucydides and Xenophon they . . . read, unmixed with the prejudiced and perverse clamours of party, the fatal consequences of misrule and anarchy, of wild democracy, of unlimited or unjust power.153 In the writings of Xenophon in particular, the nation’s future politicians learned how to avoid radical and revolutionary principles taking hold

150 [Copleston], A Reply, p. 138. 151 Ibid., 150. 152 Ibid., 151–2. 153 Ibid., 159. the new examination statute of 1800 99 in their country. “From no study”, wrote Copleston, “can an English- man . . . draw more instructive lessons, both of the danger of turbulent faction, and of corrupt oligarchy; from none can he better learn how to play skilfully upon, and how to keep in order, that finely-toned instrument, a free people.”154 Thus, for all his insistence that an Oxford education encouraged a manly and independent character, there was an equally clear message about which virtues typified the “manly” undergraduate; they were precisely the conservative, patriotic and anti-revolutionary sentiments which we saw dominate the agenda of the reformers in the years before 1800. Like many of his colleagues, he took seriously the view that a university had a moral responsibility to persuade its students of the importance of certain key values and opinions before they entered the world as men. In these views, Copleston appears to have shared the same conservative agenda as many prominent senior members including the framers of the 1800 Statute. Despite his claim that the Replies had been “suggested by his own feelings, without communication or advice”,155 it is clear from his own correspondence that his defence of the university was a well known project, heartily approved of and supported by the Vice-Chancellor, John Cole, and Chancellor, Lord Grenville.156 We have already seen the close connections between Copleston and Eveleigh.157 Indeed, Copleston claimed to be one of only a small number of people to whom the Provost of Oriel had confided his plans for a university honours system in the late 1790s.158 At one place in the first Reply, Copleston linked himself to another of the statute’s chief framers, Cyril Jackson. Quoting approvingly from a poem by the former Dean of Christ Church,159 he argued that the continued dominance of the curriculum by classical studies was primarily

154 [Copleston], A Reply, p. 160. 155 Ibid., iii. 156 W.J. Copleston, Memoir of Edward Copleston, p. 36: In a letter from Copleston to his father, probably in January 1810, he reported that: “It is already known by almost everybody here that I am engaged in this work, and from the Vice-Chancellor in particular I have received the strongest encouragement to go on.”; p. 39: In a letter from Lord Grenville to Copleston dated 15 February 1810, he recorded his wholehearted approval: “So able a vindication of the character of the university, and, what is still more important, of the cause of truth and learning, could not but be highly acceptable to me.” 157 See above, p. 76. 158 W.J. Copleston, Memoir of Edward Copleston, p. 63. 159 Although Copleston does not name Cyril Jackson as the author in the Reply, he is confirmed as such in the Memoir of Copleston compiled by his nephew. See W.J. Copleston, Memoir of Edward Copleston, p. 332. 100 chapter two due to its ability to ensure that young men imbibed the right moral and political ideas: Still lingering on the banks Of Isis’ silver stream, the Muse of Greece, As by Ilissus once, her awful truths Unfolds, and draws from many a record proud The great example, not in vain address’d To Britain’s youth, that teaches how to prize Their country’s worth, and how to guard its weal With virtue or with arms.160 The apparent inconsistency of the sentiment contained in these verses with Copleston’s earlier claim that Oxford encouraged independent speculation was also pointed out by the Edinburgh Reviewers.161 Despite his posthumous reputation as a reformer, Copleston shared much in common with the conservative framers of the Statutes of 1800 and 1807. As Richard Brent has astutely concluded, “Copleston’s promotion of educational reform . . . served an essentially conservative enterprise: to ensure the continued existence of an Anglican ruling elite and the dominance of Anglican institutions”.162 This observation could just as accurately be applied to the New Examination Statute of 1800. The same contradiction between rhetoric and content is visible in other pieces written to defend the ‘new’ system. Another tutor at Oriel and early member of the Noetic school, John Davison, wrote a number of articles for the Quarterly Review supporting Copleston’s defence of an Oxford education. Like his colleague, he worked hard to sell the ‘new’ system as better adapted to the modern world, as offering undergraduates a mature and challenging education in which independent thought was encouraged. Turning the discourse around which the Edinburgh Reviewers had used to attack the Oxford syllabus, Davison declared it to encourage precisely the opposite of a “contracted habit of mind”,163 namely “liberal unconstrained improvement.”164 Nothing exercises the mind and judgment better, he wrote, than a careful study of “religion; (in its evidences, and interpretation;) ethics, history, eloquence, poetry . . . [and] the fine arts.”

160 [Copleston], A Reply, p. 161. 161 [Knight, Playfair and Smith], “Calumnies Against Oxford”, 180. 162 R. Brent, “Copleston, Edward (1776–1849)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. 163 [J. Davison], “Edgeworth’s Essays on Professional Education”, Quarterly Review 6:11 (October 1811), 175. 164 Ibid., 177. the new examination statute of 1800 101

By contrast, the “physical sciences” should be excluded from any plan of university education “as affording very little exercise of the judgment, and the mathematical sciences as affording none at all.”165 However, in the same article, he stated it as being one of the great benefits of a classical education that it taught men to be obedient to established authority. Such an attitude was especially needed at a time when there was such a surfeit of well-educated men all over Europe, many of whom had become involved in violent revolution.166 If young men failed to imbibe correct moral and political principles at university, “what is there”, he asked, “to sustain a decent and manly spirit in them, or fill the void of involuntary leisure” when they have no work to do?167 In another article, he justified the elevation of classical studies above all others because, unlike the physical sciences and mathematics, they may be used to “correct and advance” the “moral and social nature” of undergraduates.168 Sheldon Rothblatt was right to describe the Statute of 1800 as an intriguing phenomenon requiring explanation. It has too often been simply accepted as marking the beginning of the nineteenth-century reform of Oxford. However, his pessimism about the possibility of discover- ing precisely which motivations lay behind its introduction is exaggerated. Although the minutes of the Hebdomadal Board meetings for the years immediately preceding the passage of the statute are lost, we can go beyond his suggestion that it constituted a defensive reaction to the French Revolution. As suggested in the previous chapter, the statute was not an emergency measure designed to combat new and unprecedented conditions but should rather be seen as the culmination of a much longer process. It was, at least in part, I have suggested, designed by the Heb- domadal Board (led by Cyril Jackson of Christ Church, John Eveleigh of Oriel and John Parsons of Balliol) to institute at a university level a set of measures which had proved, to their minds, effective at combating the threat posed by older, more rebellious undergraduates within their individual colleges. The various schemes of university reform which appeared following the outbreak of the American Revolution and rose steadily in number after 1789 reveal a willingness to suggest changes at a university

165 [Davison], “Edgeworth’s Essays on Professional Education”, 180. 166 See L. O’Boyle, “The Problem of an Excess of Educated Men in Western Europe, 1800–1850”, The Journal of Modern History 42:4 (December 1970), 471–95. 167 [Davison], “Edgeworth’s Essays on Professional Education”, 177. 168 [J. Davison], “Replies to the Calumnies Against Oxford”, Quarterly Review 4:7 (August 1810), 203. 102 chapter two level which had been seen to work in the colleges. A closer examination of the statute’s contents makes clear that the chief provisions (in particular, the introduction of competitive examination, independently appointed examiners and a uniform syllabus in classics and divinity) were all fore- shadowed in these earlier schemes of reform. The conservative motivations behind the new system receive further confirmation from an examination of what was said about it in the years immediately following its introduction. Significantly, both supporters and critics of the 1800 Statute agreed that it had been designed primarily to strengthen the hand of the university authorities and to provide them with greater control over the activities of undergraduates and the ideas to which they were exposed. The further tightening of the syllabus in 1807 and the introduction of yet another undergraduate examination in 1808, almost identical in content with that taken for the BA, were likewise interpreted as attempts by the Hebdomadal Board to reinforce the new structures of control put in place in 1800. Particularly worthy of note were the series of vehement Addresses directed to the members of Convocation by Edward Tatham, himself a member of the Board and a cautious supporter of the first statute. His anger and sense of betrayal at the failure of the Board to move back from its conservative stance once the threat from revolutionary France had, to his mind, passed, lend credibility to the idea that the primary motivation had been self-preservation rather than a desire for modernizing reform. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, this is also the conclusion one comes to when reading works written to justify the changes introduced by the statute. On the surface, pieces like Edward Copleston’s Replies to the Edin- burgh Reviewers claimed repeatedly that, following the reforms of 1800, Oxford was able to offer undergraduates a mature and challenging education which promoted independent thought. However, a closer reading reveals the existence of a persistent counter-discourse stressing ongoing fears about student discipline and the traditional view that the primary aim of a university curriculum was to inculcate correct moral and political values. Significantly, we noticed a similar internal contradiction in the 1800 Statute itself. In its preamble it claimed to do little more than replace an outmoded and inefficient method of examining BA candidates; and as most historians who have examined the statute have focused on the change which the framers emphasized most—the introduction of competitive examination—the view has tended to prevail that the statute aimed primarily at modernizing reform. The content of the curriculum the new examination statute of 1800 103 it prescribed has often, on account of its apparent dullness, been overlooked, explained away as evidence of Oxford’s inability to fully embrace the role of a modern university. Yet, it is precisely the retention (and indeed strengthening) of the traditional syllabus in classics and divinity which tells us most about the reasons behind the statute’s introduction. Chapter Three

THE EMERGENCE OF A JUNIOR REFORM PROGRAMME, 1807–1823

The early decades of the nineteenth century have generally been treated as a period of successful consolidation for the new system introduced in 1800. Even those historians who have seen conservative motivations behind the New Examination Statute claim that the fears of senior members soon receded as the new examinations took effect and were well received by undergraduates. According to Sheldon Rothblatt, the honours system was ideally designed to win support from “a generation of young adults seeking distinctions, pursuing recognition, looking for public reputations”.1 “If they chafed under the antiquated discipline of the universities”, he wrote, they quickly “accepted the new and different discipline of the examinations.” Fully occupied with preparations for their own trial before the examiners, undergraduates had no time in which to read dangerous texts or foment rebellion against the university authorities.2 In this view, the image of a “mature” and “manly” education, which Copleston had endeavoured to present in his Replies, had proved successful in winning over the older, more independent-minded undergraduate.3 In early nineteenth-century Cambridge, by contrast, although there were significant clashes between junior members and the university authorities, such tension seems to have had little direct relationship to the question of university reform. As the work of Andrew Warwick,4 in particular, has shown, ambitious undergraduates at Cambridge actually played an important role (together with their private tutors) in fur- thering the modernization of the curriculum. It required “years of hard work on the part of tutors and students”, he wrote, to introduce French analytical mathematics into the undergraduate syllabus in the teeth of

1 Rothblatt, “The Student Sub-culture and the Examination System”, p. 301. 2 Rothblatt, “Failure in Early Nineteenth-Century Oxford and Cambridge.” Note that this has been challenged by P.R. Deslandes, “Competitive Examinations and the Culture of Masculinity in Oxbridge Undergraduate Life, 1850–1920”, History of Education Quarterly 42:4 (2002), 546. 3 Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates, recognizable as such”, p. 171. 4 See Winstanley, Early Victorian Cambridge, pp. 18–28, 419–23. the emergence of a junior reform programme 105 significant opposition from senior members.5 Referring to what he has termed the “analytical revolution from below”,6 Warwick has identified the short-lived Analytical Society, founded in 1812, and the enthusiasm of its undergraduate membership for continental techniques as the crucial spur for the wider campaign to introduce analytical mathematics into the undergraduate curriculum. “The movement that eventually accomplished the so-called revolution in Cambridge began”, he declared, “with undergraduates working inside the system.”7 Indeed, it was only when sufficient numbers of enthusiastic undergraduates came themselves to be private tutors and examiners and were able to pass on their passion for continental mathematics to a new generation of students that the new techniques could be successfully embedded.8 In Oxford, by contrast, where competitive examination had not been accompanied by a modern syllabus and many assumed that its introduction had been primarily intended to increase senior control, junior members expressed increasing resentment at what they saw as attempts to subordinate them further to the university authorities. The growing sense of a student identity or ‘sub-culture’, which Rothblatt and others have identified in this period,9 was not simply visible in the proliferation of junior societies and the popularity of team sports; at Oxford, just as Tatham had predicted, it was increasingly directed against the dons as a body and driven by a growing sense of exclusion, not only from the decision-making processes of the university, but also from the affections of senior members. While reform of the syllabus at Cambridge, to some extent, involved the cooperation of junior and senior members, at Oxford, it developed into something of a generational battle ground. Indeed, the direction of ‘reform’ at Oxford throughout the first half of the nineteenth century was not determined, as has often been thought, by the actions of senior members alone, but also by the active participation of junior members in the debate. This chapter will focus on the development of an increasingly sophisticated and vehement vein of criticism coming directly from junior members, both undergraduates and bachelors, in the second decade of the nineteenth century. This should be seen as belonging to the wider atmosphere

5 Warwick, Masters of Theory, p. 51. 6 Ibid., 66. 7 Ibid., 67. 8 Ibid., 73. 9 See Rothblatt, “The Student Sub-culture and the Examination System.” 106 chapter three of censure which developed around the ‘new’ system in the years following its introduction. Beginning with juvenile attempts to poke fun at dons, within a few years, there began to appear works of more mature criticism like John Henry Newman’s student magazine, The Undergraduate, and James Shergold Boone’s satirical poem, The Oxford Spy. Such works were invariably well informed about the current state of the debate, showing familiarity with the chief arguments from the major journals like the Edin- burgh and Quarterly Reviews and putting forward a convincing case for a modern syllabus. It goes on to suggest that it is to this burgeoning culture of student journalism (and the note of generational revolt which it struck) that we should look for the beginnings of a movement that is usually considered conservative and counter-revolutionary in nature. As may be clear from some of the names already mentioned, it was here that key members of the future Oxford Movement first established contact with each other and honed their skills of controversy. As the next chapter will argue, there is a good case to be made for reconceptualizing Tractarianism as a radical youth movement, whose origins are to be sought in a concerted rebellion against senior authority in the second decade of the nineteenth century.

Growing Undergraduate Resentment, 1807–1816

We have seen how fears of rebellion by the university’s junior members were growing among the authorities at Oxford in the years immediately following the reformed Statute of 1807; they were perhaps most clearly articulated in the bitter responses of the Hebdomadal Board and of ‘Phila- lethes’ to Tatham’s series of Addresses;10 yet, Copleston’s emphasis on the anti-revolutionary principles of Oxford studies and his desire to present the university as a place of mature and manly education suggest the presence of similar anxieties. These fears were likely, in no small part, due to the increased practice of addressing junior members directly in works on university reform in the years following 1807. We have seen how Tatham’s respondent, ‘Philalethes’, found his appeal to undergraduates the most shocking and dangerous feature of his first Address of 1807.11 Ward’s composition of 1812, Oxoniana, was likewise addressed directly to an undergraduate at Christ Church. Crucially, though, it was not only critics of the university who engaged in this practice. An 1809 publication by

10 See above, p. 92. 11 See above, pp. 92–3. the emergence of a junior reform programme 107

Copleston, The Examiner Examined, which, although intended to criticize books seeking to bypass the university authorities and instruct undergraduates directly, was itself addressed to the “Junior Students of the Univer- sity of Oxford”.12 It seems likely that the juniors also formed part of the intended readership for the Replies; for they are described by Copleston in the introduction as a work of criticism very similar to The Examiner Examined.13 If so, it is at least plausible to suggest that Copleston’s insistence on the ‘manliness’ of Oxford and its anti-revolutionary tradition was intended as much for the eyes of undergraduates who might have been influenced by the attacks in the Edinburgh Review as it was for the reviewers themselves. We may ask why this practice of directly addressing junior members (something almost unknown in the eighteenth century),14 became relatively common in the first decades of the nineteenth. When the debate over university reform gathered pace in the late eighteenth century, there was no dominant idea of the form which such changes should take; a number of different approaches were put forward for consideration. Some, like John Napleton’s, had proposed purely structural changes to the examination system such as increasing the number of disputations candidates had to take part in and publishing the results in class lists;15 others, like that of Vicesimus Knox, focused their attention on reforming teaching practices at Oxford with suggestions for doubling the stipends of tutors and reinvigorating the professoriate.16 Other reformers concen- trated on syllabus reform, perhaps, most noticeably Edward Tatham, who campaigned for a greater emphasis on ancient history and rhetoric at the expense of Aristotelian philosophy.17 After the 1800 Statute had been passed, however, there was no longer such variety. The Vice-Chancellor and the Hebdomadal Board had committed themselves to a particular plan of ‘reform’, and, as far as they were concerned, discussion was now closed. Dissatisfaction, however, with the 1800 Statute, in particular with

12 [E. Copleston], The Examiner Examined, or, Logic Vindicated: Addressed to the Junior Students of the University of Oxford. By a Graduate (Oxford, 1809). 13 [Copleston], A Reply, p. 1. 14 There were, of course, many letters of advice and other didactic works addressed directly to undergraduates throughout the eighteenth century; the focus here, however, is on works which proposed specific reforms to the university’s institutional structures, examination practices and syllabus content. 15 [Napleton], Considerations on the Public Exercises, pp. iii, v, vii, ix, x. 16 See, for example, V. Knox, The Works of Vicesimus Knox, D.D. Vol. IV (London, 1824), pp. 141–2. 17 See, for example, Tatham, The Chart and Scale of Truth Vol. I, pp. 318–21. 108 chapter three what many considered its overly conservative nature, was so widespread that further debate and the proposal of new schemes was inevitable. The Hebdomadal Board, though, still refused to entertain new suggestions for reform. If we believe Tatham, they even resorted to altering the statutable time and place of Board meetings in order to prevent him addressing them directly with his criticisms and proposals.18 So difficult was the Board to deal with after they had adopted this isolationist approach that reformers like Tatham had to find new constituencies within the university to appeal to. Convocation was the obvious choice, to which Tatham did in fact direct his two series of Addresses; but as they continued to support the Hebdomadal Board by passing the reformed Statute of 1807 and subsequent proposed alterations to it, the junior members became the only obvious group left. The fears of the Oxford authorities, moreover, seem not to have been unfounded; the impression of most commentators at the time was that relations between junior and senior members had deteriorated significantly in the years following the institution of the reformed Statute. Elizabeth Grant, who stayed with her uncle, Dr. James Griffith, Master of University College,19 between 1810 and 1811 reported that relations had never been so strained. “The only care the Heads appeared to take”, she wrote, with regard to the young minds they were supposed to be placed where they were and paid well to help to form, was to keep the persons of the students at the greatest possible distance. They conversed with them never, invited them to their homes never, spoke or thought about them never. A perpetual bowing was their only intercourse.20 She attributed this poor state of communication to a failure on the part of senior members properly to comprehend the nature of university education. Once more, we hear the view that post-1800 Oxford, with its strict system of discipline, more closely resembled a school than a university.

18 See, for example, E. Tatham, An Address to the Members of the Hebdomadal Meet- ing, July 5th 1810 (Oxford, 1810), pp. 33–4; for a collection of Tatham’s protests against the new examination system, see E. Tatham, Oxonia Purgata: An Attempt to Correct the Errors and Abuses of the University of Oxford in a Series of Addresses; first to the Members of Con- vocation, and afterwards to the Chancellor relating to the New Discipline of that University (Oxford, 1811). 19 It is worth pointing out that James Griffith had been a member of the Hebdomadal Board which issued Edward Tatham with his reprimand for “tending to creating Divisions in the University” on June 28th 1810. 20 E. Smith, Memoirs of a Highland Lady, 1797–1830, ed., Lady J.M. Strachey (London, 1911), p. 133. the emergence of a junior reform programme 109

While “there were rules which had . . . to be obeyed, and . . . lectures that must be attended”, she wrote, “as for care to give high aims, provide refin- ing amusements, give a worthy tone to the character of responsible beings, there was none ever even thought of. The very meaning of the word education did not appear to be understood. The College was a fit sequel to the school”.21 Indeed, she described the small amount of intercourse which did go on between juniors and seniors as akin to that between a schoolmaster and his pupil. It was all “quite in the teacher and pupil style”, she observed, “very little of the anxious improver on one side, and the eager [sic] for knowledge on the other”.22 Moreover, she connected this poor state of affairs with a growing tendency towards disruptive behaviour in the undergraduate population. Finding new ways to deceive and outwit the seniors was a favourite occupation of theirs. “All sorts of contrivances were resorted to”, she observed, “to enable the dissipated to remain out at night, to shield a culprit, to deceive the dignitaries”; in general, all manner of behaviour “of a low and most thoughtless kind”. 23 “Herded together . . . in their rooms” like school boys, she believed that plans for active dissent against the seniors were hatched in secret; so strong was this impression that she referred to the undergraduates as “the young riotous community”.24 Certainly around this time, it is possible to see the growing breach between junior and senior members, in particular, a greater readiness on the part of undergraduates to challenge the authority of their tutors. One event which shows this well was the election of a new university Chan- cellor in late 1809. The two main candidates were Lord Grenville, a leading Whig peer and champion of Catholic emancipation and Lord Eldon, a high-ranking Tory, the Lord Chancellor and an opponent of modernizing reform. Just as they polarized the political world, so they did the university. Revealingly, in terms of the motivations behind the new examination system we explored in the previous chapter, Eldon’s candidature was championed by none other than John Parsons and John Eveleigh.25 In his

21 Smith, Memoirs of a Highland Lady, p. 132. 22 Ibid., 133. 23 Ibid., 133. 24 Ibid., 132. 25 Eldon was also the preferred candidate of the other chief framer of the New Exami- nation Statute, Cyril Jackson. However, as the head of the college which Eldon’s main rival for the Chancellorship, Lord Grenville, had attended, he felt unable to declare his support for Eldon publicly. With such an obvious conflict of loyalties, Jackson resigned the deanery shortly before the election in 1809. 110 chapter three private “Anecdote Book”, some years after the election, Eldon revealed that the two heads, along with Whittington Landon, Provost of Worces- ter College, had begged him to accept the nomination in an emotional letter.26 From what it is possible to reconstruct about the support which each candidate received from within the university, there seems to have been a clear division between junior and senior members. Grenville, with his sympathy for reform, was the toast of the undergraduates and junior MAs, while Eldon was the favourite of the senior MAs and heads of houses. Only two college heads, Charles Henry Hall, of Christ Church, Grenville’s old college, and Frodsham Hodson of Brasenose, spoke out publicly for Grenville. Some measure of the undergraduate support he enjoyed, however, can be seen in the enthusiastic welcome he received upon his inau- guration in the Sheldonian Theatre. The undergraduates in attendance demanded that he be given the honour of sitting among the doctors and one, showing his anti-establishment tendencies, congratulated Grenville for presiding over the university of ship money rebel John Hampden.27 One satire from the time wrote of hordes of “boys with women’s voices” who “strove to speak big, and long’d for Master’s honours” so that they could vote for Grenville.28 One of these boys, it seems, although not yet officially gone up to Oxford, was Percy Bysshe Shelley. His cousin and biographer, Thomas Medwin, wrote that Shelley was “plain and loud” in his support for Grenville, even writing a letter in support of his candidacy which was published in the Morning Chronicle, a claim which some later biographers have credited with accuracy.29 With the example of Shelley, we see the beginnings of a new phenomenon which soon became extensive—the critical undergraduate pamphlet. There had been some minor student publications in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, but none which had had criticism of the university authorities as their chief aim.30 Together with his friend and fellow undergraduate, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley produced a short essay with the provocative title, The Necessity of Atheism, in which he used standard arguments derived from logic to argue against the existence of

26 H. Twiss, The Public and Private Life of Lord Chancellor Eldon Vol. I (Philadelphia, 1844), p. 333. 27 Brock, “The Oxford of Peel and Gladstone” in Brock and Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. VI, p. 44. 28 Oxford Herald (c. 22 December 1809) in “20 papers relating to the election of Lord Grenville” in Bodleian Library G.A. Oxon b. 19 (497–549). 29 See, for example, White, Shelley, p. 75. 30 See, for example, The Loiterer. the emergence of a junior reform programme 111

God. As well as being offered for sale to the public, the two friends posted copies with handwritten letters inviting criticism and discussion to all the professors and heads of houses at Oxford as well as to various bishops and senior members at Cambridge.31 The essay was considered especially offensive by the university authorities as it appeared just a few months after Copleston’s defence of Oxford’s course of studies, in particular, of the emphasis placed on conservative divinity. In this context, the essay appeared as a direct attempt by undergraduates to challenge the authority of the university. This is certainly the way it was interpreted by Copleston, who had himself received a copy of the essay together with a letter from the students.32 In spite of the fact that neither of their names appeared on the essay, it did not take him long to discover who the authors were. As Shelley himself told a number of friends after the incident, it was Copleston who passed on the information to the Master and other senior members of University College and ensured that both Shelley and Hogg were expelled.33 By 1816, there was a feeling among many, even in Convocation, that an active campaign was now underway among the seniors to curtail at every opportunity the rights of junior members and to increase their powers of supervision over them. Anxiety remained high that the contents of the 1807 reformed Statute had led to unprecedented resentment in the undergraduate population, when the Hebdomadal Board decided to submit yet another new statute to Convocation, this time requiring even stricter standards of academic dress from junior members and increasing the authority of the proctors to impose punishments. Significantly, the statute was passed in the teeth of considerable opposition. One member of Convocation felt so strongly as to publish anonymously his reasons for voting against the statute. “A less justifiable ground for arming the Proc- tors with new powers could not have been invented”, he declared, “and if, nevertheless such a ground were to be adopted, a less suitable moment than the present could not possibly have been selected.”34 In addition to the risk of alienating undergraduates further by imposing new restrictions on them, this writer was particularly appalled by the way in which

31 White, Shelley, pp. 111–12. 32 Ibid., 113. 33 Ibid., 114. 34 Speedily will be published, Reasons for the Non Placet given by a Member of Convoca- tion in that House on the Passing of the New Statute (Oxford, 1816), pp. 9–10. 112 chapter three

bachelors, “men”, as he put it, “from 21 to 24 years of age”, would be sub- jected to such a childish scheme of discipline. “I have”, he wrote, other, and I think powerful, objections to it, as inconsistent with the present state of the University, and particularly with that of the B.A.’s [sic] who now stand upon a much higher footing than did their predecessors of the same degree, at the time when the [original] Statutes were enacted. In the first place, matriculation then took place at a much earlier age than is now cus- tomary, even as early as 13 or 14: so that the generality of Members would be admitted M.A. before they reached 21. Such being the case, it was of course advisable to continue the restraints of discipline to the full period of the second degree.35 With students being, on average, so much older now, men who were, in some cases, already teaching undergraduates as college tutors, could be given a species of punishment, namely, translating portions of a classical text, “which”, as this writer put it, “in a less enlightened period was deemed fit only for boys under 18”.36 The potential consequences for an even more serious erosion of tutorial authority were considerable, not to mention the risk of alienating young bachelors still further from the body of Oxford’s senior members. My objections, he wrote, “will appear in a still stronger light, when we consider that . . . these very persons now occupy, in some respect, the situation of Tutors; being employed in instructing and preparing undergraduates for the public examination”. By “subjecting a Bachelor to all the penalties of an undergraduate, the natural line of distinction between those who instruct, and those who are instructed, is no longer maintained, and the principles of our code are directly violated”.37 To a number of visitors who came to Oxford a year later, in 1817, undergraduate resentment appeared so strong as to be almost tangible. One such, ‘E.P’, recorded his impressions in a pamphlet, entitled A Week at Oxford. He “approached this celebrated seat of learning”, he wrote, “with a mind ardent through expectation and . . . fearless of disappointment”. When he arrived, however, he described “being constantly tormented by a set of dirty rascally-looking fellows”, none other than various represen- tatives of the undergraduate population.38 The next thing he noticed was the way in which they were treated very much like school boys by their tutors. The scenes inside the colleges, he thought, “might have induced

35 Speedily will be published, Reasons for the Non Placet, p. 10. 36 Ibid., 11. 37 Ibid., 13–14. 38 ‘E.P’., A Week at Oxford (Oxford, 1817), p. 5. the emergence of a junior reform programme 113 anyone to imagine that he was within the walls of a school” instead of a university.39 Moreover, the undergraduates he encountered seemed to have no respect for their tutors, instead resenting their authority and that of the university as a whole. From talking to a number of students, he connected this attitude with the rigorous system of discipline to which they had been subject since 1800 and which had become even stricter under the Statutes of 1807 and 1816. In a conversation with one undergraduate, ‘E.P’ was given the young man’s contrasting opinions of Cambridge and Oxford. For him, Cambridge “was as far superior to Oxford in many points, as it was possible”. “The former was a gentlemanlike place where every man did as he liked, without being pestered with the daily remonstrances of the Tutors; [there] . . . a man might cut lecture as often as he pleased.” “I say it”, the young man continued, “and I’ll maintain it too . . . I wish with all my heart and soul I had gone there instead of coming to this mere school; a place where one is treated like a child; where if one does not perfectly understand his lecture, the Tutor endeavours to expose him. D–n the place, say I.”40 Some students actually left Oxford for Cambridge in the hope of encountering a more liberal atmosphere. After the authorities at New College attempted to hinder the meetings of the Attic Society, a junior debating club, whose original members included Thomas Arnold, its founder, Augustus Hare, migrated to Cambridge, hoping for an atmosphere more receptive to his belief in the importance of free discussion and of promotion by merit rather than privilege.41 As Andrew Warwick has shown in his study of Cambridge in the first third of the nineteenth century, it was through a combination of private tutors enthusiastic for reform and ambitious undergraduates that recent developments in French analytical mathematics were at this time successfully introduced into the undergraduate curriculum.42 Given the associations with French revolutionary ideology which this type of mathematics held for many, it is a mark of just how different the intellectual atmosphere at Cambridge was by the first decades of the nineteenth century.43 Continental learning was popular among undergraduates such as those who founded the Analytical Society in 181244 and their enthusiasm was

39 ‘E.P.’, A Week at Oxford, p. 11. 40 Ibid., 17–18. 41 Hollis, The Oxford Union, pp. 13–14. 42 Warwick, Masters of Theory, p. 51. 43 Ibid., 67. On the revolutionary associations of French analytical mathematics, see Becher, “Radicals, Whigs and Conservatives”, 405. 44 Ibid., 67–70. 114 chapter three more than matched by a minority of senior members, particularly young fellows acting as private tutors, who were keen to establish analytical methods at Cambridge. As Warwick has shown, it was primarily due to the ability of enthusiastic undergraduates (men like George Peacock and Richard Gwatkin), when themselves elected fellows, tutors and examiners, to begin to introduce continental mathematics into the student curriculum which allowed the new techniques to gain a foothold.45 However, it is important to note that this development could not have taken place without the support of a majority of senior members. As Warwick has written, “The fact that the university passed legislation extending the number of days of the Senate House examination in 1828, 1833 and 1839 indicates that a majority of senior members must during this period have been in favour of the continued expansion of new mathematical topics”.46 Certainly, at this time, senior members at Oxford seem to have been aware of growing undergraduate resentment and to have been increasingly anxious about the possible consequences. The reported radicalism of students in Germany filled them with particular fear. The years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars were those in which the radicalism of German students first became a widely reported issue in the British press. A high point was reached with the murder of the German playwright, August von Kotzebue by Karl Ludwig Sand, a German student, and member of a radical undergraduate fraternity in 1819. In response, Metternich issued the Karlsbad decrees which dissolved the fraternities, known as Burschenschaften and drastically increased academic censorship and the general supervision of the state over the universities within the German Confederation. Senior members at Oxford perceived the chief problem at the German universities to be a fundamental lack of discipline and a failure on the part of professors to exercise their authority effectively. Rep- resentative of this view is an article from the Quarterly Review from 1820 by Robert William Hay, the holder of a Christ Church Studentship. “The

45 Warwick, Masters of Theory, pp. 68, 73. On the importance of undergraduates in push- ing for reform at Cambridge, see also Becher, “Radicals, Whigs and conservatives”, 406. 46 Warwick, Masters of Theory, p. 94, fn. 129. On tutors and students working together for reform at Cambridge, see also Becher, “Radicals, Whigs and conservatives”, 407, 413, 416, 418. This conclusion challenges a claim made by many historians interested in treating Oxford and Cambridge as a single cultural space, that William Whewell and other more conservative dons were representative of the opinion of senior members at Cambridge in this period. Even dons like Whewell were to a degree complicit with the introduction of continental methods, Whewell himself producing a new d-notation treatise on mechanics in 1819 and another on dynamics in 1823. the emergence of a junior reform programme 115 great cause of the irregularities which prevail at the German universities”, he wrote, “is—the want of power to enforce discipline.”47 In particular, he perceived a worrying role reversal of tutor and pupil. The professor’s reliance on his pupils’ attendance at his lectures for his income left him in “a state of most degrading dependence on the good will of the students”. Worse still, German professors were often to be found “at the head of the malcontents”, fomenting rebellion and revolution.48 Another feature of life at the German universities which worried senior members was the wide range of subjects, particularly modern science and mathematics which students could study. Hay denounced the “extremely extensive” syllabus, with its “lectures psychological, philological, pathological”. “[T]he course is not”, he complained, “merely confined to the safer round of wholesome learning which forms the staple of our college education.”49 Here, he was clearly referring to the traditional classical curriculum of Oxford, “standing forth”, in Hay’s words, “like the lofty Greek tragedians, as a teacher of moral prudence, high actions and high passions”. By contrast, German students are all speculative to a degree far surpassing even the highest flights of those in our northern capital; and all are puffed up with the most absurd notions of their own superiority to the rest of the world,—with their perfect fitness to introduce a new order of things and to become the regenerators of Europe.”50

The Beginnings of Junior Participation in the Reform Debate, 1817–1818

As yet, undergraduate resentment, although feared by many senior members and experienced, first hand, by some, had not assumed a coherent shape. However, the precedent set by Shelley and Hogg was increasingly followed by other students who began to produce ever more sophisticated forms of publication with the primary aim of expressing junior frustrations. In many ways, the emergence of a separate student estate in the 1810s closely mirrors the development of a shared sense of mission among German students in the years after the Karlsbad decrees.51 The resentment of students when faced with a raft of reactionary measures designed

47 [R.W. Hay], “State of Society, &c. in Germany”, Quarterly Review 23: 46 ( July 1820), 446. 48 Ibid., 447. 49 Ibid., 446. 50 Ibid., 447. 51 See Feuer, Conflict of Generations, pp. 63–4. 116 chapter three to control their actions, was crucial in both cases for the emergence of a new sense of generational consciousness. In 1817, the first student magazine which was entirely undergraduate in character appeared under the title, The Oxonian. The editor’s identity remains unknown although it is possible that a single student was responsible for the whole work. Although its criticisms did not move beyond a light, mocking tone, primarily directed at the childish nature of Oxford studies, it still marked an important step forward in the development of an increasingly coherent junior identity. In the third number, for example, a fictitious student by the name of ‘Jack Swallowcut’ told the story of his expulsion from Oxford for excessive drinking and begged the editor at the end of the letter, “Pray do not omit my motto at the commencement of the paper: it is all the Latin I know, but, little as it is, by a judicious application of it at all times, people imagine that Cicero could not know more than I do”.52 It also provides important evidence of the growing fashion among undergraduates at this time for copying the manners and fashions of the French. Report- ing on the increasingly popular trend, the magazine suggested that the English character, as a whole, might be improved by being mixed with a little French refinement. “[C]ourtesy and polished manners”, it asserted, “do not preclude the manly virtues . . . and . . . it is by a happy combination of these qualities that men best rise to characters of eminence and respectability.”53 However, it was not until the appearance of the Oxford Spy in the following year that junior frustrations found a distinctive voice. The five dialogues in verse between an undergraduate, ‘P’, and a senior member, ‘C’, embodied, for the first time, many of the frustrations which undergraduates felt towards their tutors and the university authorities in general. They were written by James Shergold Boone, a second-year undergraduate at Christ Church, when he was just twenty years old. What is perhaps most interesting is the degree to which they correctly articulate many of the complaints and rebellious aims which Oxford senior members feared undergraduates had been harbouring for a considerable period of time. Indeed, through the character ‘C’, the dialogues betray a high degree of familiarity with the points of view expressed by senior members in the debate over university reform since the passing of the reformed Statute

52 The Oxonian (Oxford, 1817), p. 12. 53 Ibid., 13–14. the emergence of a junior reform programme 117 of 1807.54 This is true to such an extent that some commentators have been led to identify ‘C’ as Edward Copleston, the great defender of the university.55 If this identification is accepted, even more weight would be lent to the argument that The Oxford Spy dialogues offer a literary rep- resentation of the intergenerational struggle apparent in the university reform debate by 1818. Indeed, it will be suggested here that Boone fully intended ‘P’ and ‘C’ to stand respectively for what he considered the views typical of junior and senior members at large. Just as senior members like Copleston and Tatham feared, undergraduates, represented here by ‘P’, could trace much of their resentment and frustration back to their feelings of deep disappointment on arrival in Oxford, similar to those experienced by Gibbon nearly seventy years earlier. Near the beginning of the first dialogue, for instance, ‘P’ attributed his antipathy towards Oxford and desire to quit the place to his having grown “sick of scenes, unlike what fancy drew”.56 “Heav’n!”, he thought, “how I hop’d, in studious calm to find”, Peace for the soul and wisdom for the mind! How swift, how bright, the kindling visions came! How burnt the thirst of science, and of fame! What bade these feelings ebb, ye pedants say? What broke the dream, and rent the veil away? What dash’d these hopes to nothing?—’Twas to see Such folly clothed in such solemnity; To see amid the foldings of the gown, Lurk the same feelings which disgrace the town.57 What is particularly noteworthy about The Oxford Spy is the extent to which its author has imbibed the arguments on both sides of the debate, suggesting clearly that interested undergraduates like Boone were indeed

54 The title of the dialogues also reveals knowledge of the arguments contained in an early eighteenth century pamphlet written under the pseudonym ‘John Perspective’, The Spy at Oxford and Cambridge, which originally appeared in 1734. Moreover, the main point which the writer of this pamphlet made about the senior members at Oxford and Cambridge, namely that they were hypocrites who were as badly behaved in private as those they criticised in public, was one of the central concerns of The Oxford Spy. See esp. ‘J. Perspective’, The Spy at Oxford and Cambridge. Containing, Many Remarkable Transac- tions, Well Worthy the Attention of the Most Curious Reader. In Several Letters Between John Perspective, and Critical Wou’d-be, Esqrs. (London, 1744), pp. 8, 12, 18, 43–6. Note also that ‘Perspective’ and ‘Critical’ may be the origins of ‘P’ and ‘C’ in The Oxford Spy. 55 The earliest reference I can find to this identification is in the Catalogue of Dulau & Co., ltd., Booksellers, London (1845), p. 33. 56 [ J.S. Boone], The Oxford Spy; In Verse. Dialogue the First (Oxford, 1818), p. 5. 57 Ibid., 8–9. 118 chapter three reading publications on university reform. Thus many of the criticisms he made of Oxford resembled closely those made previously by Tatham and the Edinburgh Reviewers. There was a similar emphasis placed on the childishness of Oxford studies and the university’s system of discipline; and the arguments were once more structured around distinctions of youth and age. At one point, for instance, Boone claimed that boys received a higher standard of classical education at public school than the young men who attended Oxford;58 elsewhere, he compared the “minute and puerile accuracy” of his university studies with the “wide and manly spirit of inquiry” he had hoped to find there.59 Like Tatham and the Edinburgh Reviewers, Boone used ‘P’ to complain in particular about the dominance of Aristotelian philosophy at Oxford, which, by preventing students reading modern philosophy, above all Bacon’s Novum Organum, severely hindered their intellectual development. ‘P’’s charge that Aristotle exercised a “despotic empire o’er the mind” at Oxford is reminiscent of Tatham’s comparison of Aristotle’s relationship to Oxford with Alexander the Great’s military stranglehold over much of the known world.60 Other criticisms were taken directly from the attacks in the Edin- burgh Review. The university’s senior members were wrong, ‘P’ alleged, to “sit down with contentment and self complacency in ignorance and in error, . . . to consider, as has been often observed, “the antiquity as the infancy of the world.”61 It is clear that Boone had thought carefully about this charge, adding his own gloss as follows: “In works of imagination the first will be generally the best; and Homer therefore is yet unrivalled: but in productions, whose excellence depends upon reasoning and investigation, improvement must naturally advance with time.”62 Likewise, Boone picked up on the theme of Oxford’s overly strict system of discipline. If Aristotle was the tyrant of the schools, “the despot Proc- tors” were felt to hold a similar sway over university discipline.63 In ‘C’’s answer to ‘P’’s tirade against the proctors, Boone revealed his knowledge

58 [ J.S. Boone], An Appendix to the Oxford Spy (Oxford, 1818), p. 10. 59 Ibid., 15. 60 Tatham, A Letter to the Reverend The Dean of Christ-Church, p. 14. 61 [Boone], An Appendix to the Oxford Spy, p. 27. As part of the same charge, ‘P’ complained that senior members “persuade themselves that in all human as well as divine institutions ‘whatever is, is right.’ ” This last phrase in inverted commas is a quotation from Alexander Pope which served as a motto for the 1744 The Spy at Oxford and Cambridge showing once again the links between this pamphlet and Boone’s dialogues. 62 [ J.S. Boone], The Oxford Spy; In Verse; Dialogue the Fourth (Oxford, 1818), p. 73. 63 [ J.S. Boone], The Oxford Spy; In Verse. Dialogue the Second (Oxford, 1818), p. 3. the emergence of a junior reform programme 119 of Copleston’s argument in the Replies,64 that junior members, although no longer schoolboys, were not yet fully mature men and therefore still required some curbs on their freedom: And who shall grieve, that just restraint should bind, In youth, the wanton turbulence of mind, When life is joyous, and in warmer flood Boils the mad torrent of impetuous blood?65 Boone’s emphasis on the hypocrisy of dons and tutors who cursed the unpredictability of youth and yet behaved themselves like riotous undergraduates, seems also to have been borrowed from the works of Tatham and the Edinburgh Reviewers. “Yet all must laugh”, he wrote, “if men impose restraint”, Who act the sinner, and assume the saint; Grave moralists o’er youthful follies sigh,— Whose ev’ry action gives their words the lie; . . . If tutors punish what they seldom shun, Severe to all who do—as they have done . . .66 Such conduct, he argued, had had profound consequences for relations between juniors and seniors and was largely responsible for the unprecedented decline in the quality of communication witnessed in recent years. It was now a common story, he gave ‘P’ to lament, that . . . some gay Tutor, while he pockets pounds, More rarely sees his pupils, than the hounds; For let them fail, or prosper, sink, or swim, Most mighty Nimrod! what are they to him?67

64 See above, p. 98. 65 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Second, p. 4. Indeed, through his charac- terization of ‘C’, Boone demonstrated a high level of awareness about the way in which many of Oxford’s senior members viewed the period of youth: as a uniquely troubling and potentially subversive transition from childhood to manhood. See for example, [ J.S. Boone], The Oxford Spy; In Verse. Dialogue the Third (Oxford, 1818), p. 5: Oh youth, our loveliest, yet most dangerous state— Season of joy—but crisis of our fate— . . . When now in swifter course the life-drops run; Boyhood scarce past, or manhood scarce begun; When the soul’s bias, tone, and strength, are form’d; Our vice deep-rooted; or our virtue warm’d . . . 66 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Second, p. 6. This loss of authority through acting the part of those you condemn is remarkably similar to that which Tatham said had befallen the Vice-Chancellor by violating his own statutes. See above, p. 89. 67 Ibid., 14. 120 chapter three

It was precisely this reflection upon how men, who were, in truth, as immature as their students, could think themselves grave and wise, which led ‘P’ to endorse the charge of the Edinburgh Reviewers that the infancy of science was indeed mistaken for its maturity at Oxford; for, if, he explained, the tutors who regaled students with the superior wisdom of antiquity, behaved themselves like school boys, how could anyone believe that the classical learning they praised was really worthy of esteem? “Therefore must I smile”, confessed ‘P’, If solemn jugglers thoughtless youth beguile; Must think, no cap can mend the head below it, No gown create philosopher or poet: Must doubt, if reason always held the torch To guide the Academus or the Porch:— Tho’ Athens beam, rever’d from length of age, If all her Sages were so very sage!68 The strong similarities which the criticisms in The Oxford Spy shared with the attacks in the Edinburgh Review were actually acknowledged by Boone in the text. Thus, at one point, he had ‘C’ warn ‘P’ as follows: Have a care! let Scotch Reviewers write These idle calumnies,69 as false as trite; Distort the truth, with stupid rancour ply The oft-told tale, the long-exploded lie. Adopt not thou the hireling scribbler’s trade: The worst of villains is a renegade.70 Furthermore, Boone admitted that he saw his own criticisms of Oxford as forming part of a much larger climate of public antipathy towards the university with which he was all too familiar; indeed, one of his most serious complaints was the seeming indifference of senior members to such persistent criticism: I say no more; raise, Oxford, raise thy pride! One of thy sons, by heav’n, is satisfied! What! tho’ the nation smile to view thy Dons Move in one line, like mere automatons; They scorn the laughter loud, the murmur deep;

68 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Second, p. 11. 69 The use of the word ‘calumnies’ here also lends weight to the identification of ‘C’ as Copleston, author of three Replies to the Calumnies of the Edinburgh Review Against Oxford. 70 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Second, pp. 14–15. the emergence of a junior reform programme 121

And, nobly callous to derision, sleep! What, though the world no more thy name revere— Thou still disdain’st its unenlightened sneer; Canst still thy mumm’ry, forms, and logic, prize; And praise the most, what most the rest despise . . .71 Boone, however, intended The Oxford Spy not simply as a forum in which to vent his frustrations; he intended it as a positive contribution to the debate over university reform in which he thought junior members should play a leading role. Thus ‘P’ spent considerable time in the dialogues frightening ‘C’ with the potentially shocking consequences of the stubborn indifference of senior members to Oxford’s failings; firstly, then, he told of the deleterious effect upon the intellectual and moral development of undergraduates. A whole generation of students, he argued, were being unmanned, in so far as they were not allowed to develop, morally and intellectually, into mature men. “Yet is there danger”, he wrote, . . . that such learned ease O’er youthful minds has too much pow’r to please; Without excitement broods the love of rest In dead’ning influence o’er the stagnant breast: Increasing sloth must want of impulse breed, And talents ere they ripen, run to seed.72 To emphasize this point, Boone employed a skilful adaptation of Copleston’s student-plant metaphor.73 Instead of Copleston’s “saplings [who] take their full spread and send forth their vigorous shoots in all the boldness and variety of nature”,74 ‘P’ described the typical undergraduate as: A stunted plant in uncongenial earth, [Thus] droops the sad soul in vigour and in worth . . . The joys are dead, ere life is well begun; His wit, sense, genius, dwindle to a pun.75 Worse still for Boone, was the conviction that this premature ending of youthful promise had been actively hoped for by the framers of the 1800

71 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Fourth, p. 30. 72 [ J.S. Boone], The Oxford Spy; In Verse. Dialogue the Fifth (Oxford, 1819), pp. 32–3. 73 See, for example, [Copleston], A Reply, pp. 157–8. 74 Ibid., 157. 75 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Second, p. 9. Interesting, here, is ‘C’’s counter to this in which he argued that intellectual and moral stagnation would be the result of undergraduates rebelling against their seniors. They would end up mere “wrecks of manhood”, he declared. On this see [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Third, p. 17. 122 chapter three and 1807 Statutes; that they were, indeed, primarily conceived as means by which to hold back the development of independence of mind in undergraduates. Such, of course, would have been a betrayal of the university’s prime responsibility—to nurture intellectual development in its students. Instead of the excitement of philosophical discovery, ‘P’ lamented, undergraduates were instead preoccupied with the childish studies of Greek and Latin composition and equally immature pastimes like billiards and cards. “Young men, alas! in this degenerate nation”, he wrote, Perform no works of supererogation. For see, what nearer, weightier cares engage The youth of England in our happy age! See, to their view, what varied pleasure springs; Cards, tennis, billiards, and ten thousand things.76 This impression is reinforced by the way in which Boone had ‘C’ repeatedly use his greater age to justify his legitimate exercise of authority over ‘P’. “You who still dread the ordeal of our Schools”, he cautioned the student, Too young to influence, or to change the rules, Be not misled:—your manly course pursue, And honours, fortune, fame, shall smile for you! . . . ’Tis yours no crude attempts to make or prize, But calmly bear what older heads advise; To wait, till Reason sheds her certain ray, And sage Experience points the better way.77 Yet, what comes through most strongly in the dialogues is Boone’s determined attempt to use The Oxford Spy as a means by which to exhort other undergraduates to involve themselves in the reform debate and convince the university’s senior members that the juniors were a force to be reck- oned with. In a key exchange between ‘P’ and ‘C’, he depicted the older man realizing with clear distress that ‘P’ was serious when he threatened to rebel if Oxford’s failings were not quickly remedied: C: Young man, beware! ’tis grievous want of sense to give men in authority offence. and what your motives? P: Motives!—love of truth,

76 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the First, p. 17. 77 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Fifth, p. 52. On this see also [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Fourth, p. 17. the emergence of a junior reform programme 123

and pain, when error warps the mind of youth: Motives, than fear of angry Dons more strong, and lending vigour to the weakest song!78 With calm composure, ‘P’ employed the legend of King Canute forbidding in vain the waves from touching him, to explain what would happen if the senior members, who had directed the reform process so far, failed to listen to undergraduate grievances: no respect would be shown them, no matter how superior they considered themselves to be: When Danish Canute loiter’d on the shore, No wave durst touch a king, his courtiers swore. Why ebb ye not, ye tides?—a monarch stands To claim obedience, and ye seek the sands! Yes! they roll’d on, by mightier nature bound, And bade the monarch vanish—or be drown’d.79 In the Appendix to the Oxford Spy, where Boone wrote with his own voice; he confirmed his seriousness about contributing to the reform debate and denied that his youth disqualified him from offering his opinions; indeed, he claimed, it made his and the views of his like-minded friends even more worth listening to: “We are not yet of an age”, he declared, “to bear all this with the philosophical indifference of our seniors; but, on the other hand, we are no longer children, and it is time that we should have, ‘what even slaves are free to,’ liberty of thought.” “Our men in authority”, he continued, may display all the suspicion which accompanies the consciousness of a bad cause; all the severity which is the offspring of fear; and all the resolution which is the consequence of despair: but they will not deter us from exercising our own understandings on points which concern our own welfare and have a reference not only to ourselves, but to every generation which may succeed us in this place. Our selfish, and our disinterested feelings, shall be all equally awakened.80 The programme of reform which Boone desired was as radical as those of Tatham and the Edinburgh Reviewers; in many ways, it was influenced directly by their suggestions. Like them, he would not abandon classical studies outright, but would seek to combine the advantages which, when properly taught, they undoubtedly conferred (i.e. an education in

78 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Second, p. 11. 79 Ibid., 11–12. 80 [Boone], Appendix to the Oxford Spy, p. 28. 124 chapter three

“elegance and taste”) with a thorough training in modern philosophy and mathematics.81 Significantly, he described this combination in terms of mixing the best of the old learning with the best of the new (to “mature taste, feeling, principle, and raise/With feats of eld, the fire of younger days”).82 For, he argued, echoing Tatham once again,83 the years spent at university, being those in which the transition to manhood was completed, were the most precious in life and so must be spent in the way best designed to “form from docile youth th’accomplished man”.84 In some senses, though, the proposals he put forward were more radical even than those of Tatham and the Edinburgh Reviewers; he saw, for example, an intimate connection between the failings of schools and the problems at Oxford and called for wide-reaching changes in both.85 Thus, when asked what his aims were by ‘C’, ‘P’ replied as follows: What object, ask you? To discuss with truth The ripe instruction of ingenuous youth; To trace how School and College form the mind To fill the higher stations of mankind, Most, how we spend the last best years enjoy’d In bookish ease, or well, or ill employed; Ere ardent youth forsake this sacred seat, Their education deem’d at least complete All grown to manhood, though scarce one in ten Fit to converse, and act, and live with men.86

After the ‘Oxford Spy’: Student Journalism and Generational Revolt

Boone was not unjustified in depicting those of his fellow undergraduates interested in reform as a sizeable group. His confident assertion that “we are no longer children, and . . . they will not deter us from exercising our own understandings” was met with a flurry of other undergraduate publications in the months and years following the appearance of The Oxford Spy. Some, indeed, like A Letter to the Oxford Spy, by Henry John Herbert, Third Earl of Carnarvon, which came out in the same year, were inspired

81 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Second, p. 21. 82 Ibid., 22. 83 See, for example, Tatham, A Fifth Address, pp. 9–10. 84 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Fifth, p. 44. 85 In this proposal, Boone was probably closest to the ideas of Vicesimus Knox as expressed in his 1789 Letter to Lord North. 86 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the Fifth, pp. 17–18. the emergence of a junior reform programme 125 directly by Boone’s efforts.87 Like Boone, Herbert was an undergraduate at Christ Church; while Boone had been twenty, he was just eighteen and a university freshman. Although there is little evidence of direct contact between the two young men, they must have enjoyed fairly close relations, being members of the same college and only one academic year apart. Their connection with Christ Church appears even more significant when we consider that it was the Dean of Christ Church, Cyril Jackson, who many, including Tatham, saw as responsible for the failings of the 1800 and 1807 Statutes. There is certainly a high degree of coherence between Herbert’s criticisms and those made by Boone. Like Boone, he argued for a substantial component of modern learning in any new university curriculum, ridicul- ing Oxford’s traditional justification of its hostility to change, namely that “tis a truth in ev’ry age confest/That what is most matur’d, is ever best”.88 He also picked up on the unmanning effect of the current curriculum, which, when completed, left an undergraduate as ignorant and intellectually immature as when he began. He evinced a particular disdain for the system of ‘cramming’ which had become a ‘must’ for every candidate keen to pass his examination in the Schools since the Statute of 1800 had been introduced: Here Logic, Ethics, all together class’d, He scarce remembers what he learnt the last; . . . The mass subsists an hour—perchance a day O’er his cramm’d head preserves a doubtful sway, Then fails, and vanish’d all his hard-earn’d lore, He stands as vacant as he stood before.89 Like Boone, moreover, Herbert also seems to have engaged with the body of wider criticism against the university. Thus his decision to present Oxford in the form of an “infant” with “stinted growth and vacant gaze,” was perhaps influenced by similar depictions of the 1807 Statute as a “mis-shapen” and “hobbling” child in the works of Tatham and Ward respectively.90 Once more, like Boone, he showed an acute understanding of the arguments made by Oxford’s defenders like Copleston and represented their position with surprising accuracy. He imagined such a man

87 [H.J.G. Herbert], A Letter [in verse, in reply] to the Oxford Spy, from the Bigwig’s Friend (Oxford, 1818). 88 Ibid., 14. 89 Ibid., 16. 90 Tatham, A Letter to the Rev. The Dean of Christ Church, p. 4; Ward, Oxoniana, p. 66. 126 chapter three realizing the full seriousness of the threat posed by the juniors for the first time with the publication of The Oxford Spy; and depicted him attempting to convince other undergraduates of the dangers of “wild reform”: “Arise”, he cried, “arise inactive Youth, “And hear the doctrines of eternal truth. “Have you not heard, how hard beset by foes “Our honour’d system verges to its close? “That he, whose trait’rous writings late we saw “Alike subversive of our Church and Law, “Dabbles in politics—and dares maintain, “The Proctor’s is an arbitrary reign; “. . . But worst of politics, are those, which form “The damning principles of wild reform. “. . . We never factious principles advance, “But think what innovation did in France.”91 The following year, in 1819, two undergraduates of Trinity, John Henry Newman and John Bowden undertook to publish another student magazine, The Undergraduate. They were only too conscious of the novelty of their endeavour and the importance of such publications for fostering a sense of student identity. In the opening number, Newman expressed his “regret that no periodical publication has been continued at Oxford by an Undergraduate” and his hope that his magazine might act “as a reposi- tory” for the “many little compositions circulated about the University” by like-minded students.92 Despite these grand hopes, The Undergradu- ate ran to just six weekly numbers before it had to be given up when the identity of the authors was discovered. In that short time, however, Newman and Bowden managed to take further the kind of criticisms of the Oxford syllabus and strict disciplinary system which Boone had made so effectively in the Oxford Spy. Indeed, they acknowledged the connection with Boone, referring to his popularity with the undergraduate body, quoting his poem93 and publishing in one number a letter addressed “To The Oxford Spy”.94 In the first issue, they wrote that they expected their “chief supporters” to be those undergraduates who were keen to see “the cultivation of modern literature” at Oxford.95 The dominance of Aristo- tle after the reformed Statute of 1807 was held up to ridicule with one

91 [Herbert], Letter to the Oxford Spy, pp. 18–19. 92 [ J.H. Newman and J. Bowden], The Undergraduate (Oxford, 1819), p. 8. 93 Ibid., 6. 94 Ibid., 25. 95 Ibid., 7–8. the emergence of a junior reform programme 127 issue placing the “practical utility of Aristotle”96 (so often argued for by Copleston in the Replies) on the moon along with everything else which “had at any period been lost upon earth”.97 In the same issue, the editors argued that “the wit of a Don” and “the lenity of an Examining Master” should also be placed on the moon.98 Indeed, one of the most frequent objects of attack was the way in which the new examination system had invested senior members with a vast and unfair power over the lives of undergraduates. Encapsulating the fate of many in the story of one particular student, they wrote: A luckless youth I sing, who, with a host Of books unread; in vain pretext went up, And logicless; with bold design and boast, In rash revolt against examining force Waged fruitless war . . . Him academic power Hurled headlong, funking, from the Crowded Schools, With hideous plucking and rejection down.99 It is clear that Newman and Bowden saw the conservative curriculum as another vital prop supporting the powers of senior members; as they told in the same story, it was the confusing classical syllabus, particularly Aris- totelian logic, which ensured the downfall of the hapless student: This is thy precious work, parent of logic! Great Aldrich! This is thy confounded plucking, Patron of Schoolmen’s learning ...... and all the trumpery of ages—Who shall tempt, with dizzy brain, Thy dark unfathom’d, measureless confusion?100 They went on to include a fictional letter written by a “Tutor at Oxford” to his friend in the country in which he laid out a scheme of college ‘reform’ which he freely admitted was designed to constrain the students and to treat them like children: But in fact we have lately had much occupation, Attempting at college a grand reformation. . . . We are not without hope that the next generation May be made to submit to severe flagellation.

96 [Newman and Bowden], The Undergraduate, p. 17. 97 Ibid., 23. 98 Ibid., 21. 99 Ibid., 29. Cf. J. Milton, Paradise Lost I.44–6. 100 Ibid., 29. 128 chapter three

I’m aware you will say misdemeanours and crimes Were not punished thus in the earlier times, And that those who at present are bachelors, then Were wont to be treated like rational men. I confess it is likely they will be amazed To see a grown gentleman solemnly raised On the back of a scout in the presence of all To be whipped by the Dean or the Bursar in hall: But such is our plan, and if this should succeed, We prohibit all wine, and shall substitute mead: With this we shall suffer the men to make free, Or that equally innocent beverage, tea.101 As Newman’s autobiographical writings make clear, he was referring here, at least in part, to actual ‘reforms’ which were being experimented with in certain colleges. Oriel, for example, had attempted to ban wine and encourage junior members to drink tea instead.102 Elsewhere he referred to the outrage among undergraduates which had greeted the attempts at his own college, Trinity, to strengthen internal discipline. “It is become one of the strictest of colleges”, wrote Newman, “there are lamentations in every corner of the increasing rigour.”103 The resentment felt by junior members as a class was tangible in the Undergraduate and, at times, Newman and Bowden came close to articu- lating the very kind of motivations which had lain behind the Statutes of 1800, 1807 and 1808. “Here”, they wrote, referring to Oxford, “politeness is an article of Statute, and civility is enforced by fine and imposition, the certainty of rebuke, and the possibility of whipping.” “Was it pride or meanness”, they asked, “ambition of respect, or the dread of degradation, that dictated the framers of academical laws, their ridiculous enactments?”104 Just as with The Oxford Spy, The Undergraduate did not stop at mere criticism, but voiced at times an open threat of rebellion against the university authorities. “Do they really enjoy the sulky homage of the sneering undergraduate”, Newman asked, or suppose, that as long as they require reverence by arbitrary rule, the obedience of their temporary subjects can ever be extended into an affection for their persons? . . . It will be well if these and other faults be amended

101 [Newman and Bowden], The Undergraduate, pp. 50–1. 102 J.H. Newman, Autobiographical Writings (London, 1957), p. 37. 103 Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman During his Life in the English Church, ed. A. Mozley (London, 1903), p. 30. 104 [Newman and Bowden], The Undergraduate, p. 37. the emergence of a junior reform programme 129

quickly. A stronger pen than mine may otherwise be roused against them. Its energies repressed in one direction, may burst forth with double fury in another, and sweep away with a resistless force, both the obstacles of pride, and the arguments of folly.105 It was not just undergraduates who provided junior frustrations with a public voice. A number of critical publications by bachelors also appeared in the years immediately following The Oxford Spy. Although no longer undergraduates, bachelors were still considered junior members of the university and many had felt recently insulted by the decision of the Hebdomadal Board and Convocation to give the proctors new powers to punish them in the Statute of 1816.106 Charles William Stocker was one BA who felt strongly enough to publish his thoughts in the form of a satirical pamphlet in 1820 called Reflections occasioned by the Flirtations of Alma Mater and the Stagyrite. As is clear from the title, his main focus was upon the continued dominance of Oxford by the study of Aristotelian philosophy; in order to demonstrate the childish and immature nature of the university’s traditional curriculum, he depicted Oxford and Aristotle respectively as small children playing together under the control of the tutors. Imagining the university in the form of a little girl, he wrote, They will not suffer her to run about without leading-strings; they treat her like a baby, and cry, “Here’s little Master Aristotle! Such a pretty play-fellow, such a lovely sweet-heart for little Miss. Be very fond of him, there’s a darling child, and you shall have sugar-plums, and double-blossoms, and everything that’s nice.107 Like Boone and Herbert, Stocker was candid about the reforms he would like to see in order to reduce the “puerility” of the traditional curriculum: “We would have”, he asserted, “the classical department thrown open; we would wish to see (when ancient history is to be read) the excellent sense of Polybius and the profound maxims of Tacitus, raised to a level with writings frequently offensive by their puerility”; and “when classics are to

105 [Newman and Bowden], The Undergraduate, pp. 37–8. 106 John Campbell, a BA Exhibitioner at Balliol on the Snell Foundation, described the bachelors’ feelings of kinship with the undergraduates thus in J. Campbell, Hints for Oxford (Oxford, 1823), p. 6: “. . . we are still so little donnish, as to like you withal a thousand times better than those faultless and frowning beings, who must needs be ever rowing you at lecture, and sconcing you after chapel, those stiff and stately personages that lord it over you.” 107 [C. Stocker], Reflections Occasioned by the Flirtations of Alma Mater and the Stagyrite (Oxford, 1820), p. 10. 130 chapter three be studied . . . the fire of Demosthenes, and the polish of Cicero proposed to the embryo senator, as equally improving”.108 Despite having achieved first-class honours in Literae Humaniores in 1820, Daniel Sandford, a graduate of Christ Church, lost out at the open fellowship elections at Oriel the following year. Shortly afterwards, he vented his frustrations in a vicious attack upon Copleston, then Provost of Oriel, and the system he had defended in the Replies. He showed a clear familiarity with the current university reform debate, referring directly to the contest between Copleston and the Edinburgh Review. He even set himself up as a second Sydney Smith, disparaging Copleston’s defence of the university.109 Like other junior members, Sandford reiterated the central accusation of the Edinburgh Reviewers, that Oxford’s classical curriculum produced not men but overgrown school boys. Referring to recent works by Copleston and John Davison,110 he condemned them as puerile and worthless. “Who can be surprised”, he wrote, “that the maturity which succeeds to a youth so prostituted, should produce, by its most vigorous efforts, nothing better than obscene verses in a newspaper, or discourses on Predestination?”111 Under men like Copleston, he alleged, colleges with so-called ‘open’ fellowships did not select candidates marked out by their intellectual and moral maturity, but rather semi-men, somewhere between youth and maturity, who would pose no challenge to their authority. “Let a young man”, he wrote, “only abdicate the privilege of thinking . . . and the ‘way to win’ with such electors is no formidable problem.” “As an undergraduate”, he must merely “be regular at Latin prayers, and sedulous in capping” and “after a dull examination in the schools—if a failure so much the better”, he may present himself without fear for election to a fellowship. “With a manner so nicely balanced between the weight of manhood and the decent levity of youth that it happily escapes the grace- fulness of either . . . our tyro may then approach the scene of action, secure

108 [Stocker], Reflections Occasioned by the Flirtations of Alma Mater and the Stagyrite, p. 13. 109 See, for example, [D.K. Sandford], “Classical Education”, Edinburgh Review 35:70 (July 1821), 304–5. “That malignant dulness”, he wrote of Copleston, “which formerly took so much pains, first to misrepresent, and then revile our spirit towards the Body it contin- ues to disgrace, might learn to blush for its poor perversions and witless insincerity.” 110 At the time of the conflict with the Edinburgh Review, Davison wrote two articles in the Quarterly Review in support of the 1800 Statute and Copleston’s defence: [ J. Davi- son], “Review of Replies to the Calumnies of the Edinburgh Review”, Quarterly Review 4:7 (August 1810), 177–206; [ J. Davison], “Remarks on Edgeworth’s Professional Education”, Quarterly Review 6:11 (October 1811), 166–191. 111 [Sandford], “Classical Education”, 312. The work by Copleston here referred to is his An Enquiry into the Doctrines of Necessity and Predestination (Oxford, 1821). the emergence of a junior reform programme 131 that the judges will take good care that “the race will not be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong.”112 In his 1822 letter to the distinguished Oxford classicist, Peter Elmsley, Sandford’s charges became louder and more obnoxious.113 The fellowship examination was once more condemned for insisting on “barbarous logic and childish physics”114 and the writing of “a school-boy theme of four pages, perhaps on a subject that would require a volume”.115 He reiterated the charge that such exams “must counteract, in the youthful bosom, all the beneficial influence of . . . previous liberal and manly discipline, and reduce the character and intellect . . . to the standard of that cast, with which they aim, at the expense of original bent and native excellence, to be for the future identified”.116 He then launched a full-scale assault on the current state of junior-senior relations at Oxford. There was a state of latent rebellion, he claimed, with all outward signs of respect having to be extracted by force through an embarrassing school-boy discipline. “The junior members”, he wrote, employing imagery very similar to that we saw used by Newman and Bowden in the Undergraduate, “must cap tutors by the book. Their cappings are rigidly enforced . . . tokens of reverence, whose omission may be punished by tasks and ratings, or even, I suppose, si per aetatem licet [if it is appropriate for their age], by whipping in the buttery.”117 He went on to condemn the entire undergraduate curriculum in similar terms. Reasserting the old charge of Sydney Smith, that Oxford taught the infancy of science rather than its maturity, senior members, were, he claimed, afraid to teach modern subjects in case undergraduates learned to think for themselves. Once again, the focus was on the pre- dominance of Aristotelian logic and, in particular, the requirement for all undergraduates to learn by heart the arguments of Aldrich’s logic handbook which he considered out-of-date and far too juvenile for young men of twenty-one and twenty-two years of age. “Even at this day”, he wrote, “we know . . . that the . . . fooleries of Aldrichian logic, as absurd as ‘the dictates of Aristotle’ when ‘listened to as infallible decrees,’ are still gravely played off, as an indispensable amusement in the Schools.”118

112 [Sandford], “Classical Education”, 311–12. 113 D.K. Sandford, A Letter to Peter Elmsley (Oxford, 1822), p. 38. Shakespeare, Henry IV. Part I. 114 Ibid., 28. 115 Ibid., 31. 116 Ibid., 20. 117 Ibid., 25. 118 Ibid., 54. 132 chapter three

External commentators were not slow to remark upon the embarrass- ment which such comments from junior members caused the university. One writer, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, said he wished to say “very few words” about Sandford’s unfortunate publications. “Could anything be more absurd”, he asked, than for . . . a young man who left Oxford only last year . . . to turn around, in this ungracious manner on his old Alma Mater . . . ? What does Mr Sandford know about . . . Dr Copplestone [sic] and Mr Davison, that he should talk about them so briskly? Has he ever read . . . Copplestone [sic] on Predestina- tion? If he had done so, he must have perceived that the head of Oriel is no mark for clever lads of two-and-twenty to fling their jibes at, in six-penny pamphlets.119 Other bachelors took to warning undergraduates directly by adopting for their own purposes the traditional genre of the letter of advice.120 In 1823, John Campbell, a BA exhibitioner at Balliol, took this one stage further, expressing his criticisms and proposing changes in the form of a full length handbook for university freshmen entitled Hints for Oxford. To better persuade his undergraduate readership to join the campaign for reform, he stressed his closeness to them in age and experience. “We were but lately one of you”, he wrote, “and for four long years made considerable progress in losing our Latin and running in debt.”121 He painted a stark picture of the depth of undergraduate frustration and their enthusiasm for those who criticized the senior members; upon picking up his book, he imagined them crying out in anger: “Now the day of vengeance is come, here we shall have a glorious exposé of the antiquated absurdi- ties of the University, a tirade against the dons and duns, an abuse of Logic and the Schools, and a complete scalping of Examining-masters and Proctors!”122 He wrote of nothing less than “an open rupture with our ven- erable Alma Mater”.123 Moreover, he attributed these high levels of resentment to the restrictive system of discipline to which undergraduates had been subject since 1800. He described the effect upon them as akin to

119 ‘JCB’, “New Oxford Controversy”, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 11 (June 1822), 678–9. 120 In relation to the University of Oxford, this genre goes back at least as far as the late seventeenth century, for example, R. Lingard, A Letter of Advice to a Young Gentleman Leav- ing the University: Concerning his Behaviour and Conversation in the World (Dublin, 1670). 121 Campbell, Hints for Oxford, pp. 1–2. 122 Ibid., 2. 123 Ibid., 2. the emergence of a junior reform programme 133 that upon children who are forced to wear “leading-strings”.124 “It is well known to us”, he wrote, “how stoutly ye hate that rusty rod of iron which Alma Mater thinks it necessary to use for your good and improvement.”125 Yet, like Boone and Herbert, it was the intellectual stagnation suffered by students which caused him most concern. Milton, he felt, best summed up the destructive impact on each young mind in Paradise Regained when he described one “who reads” Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep versed in books, and shallow in himself; Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys, As children gathering pebbles on the shore.126 Most wanted at Oxford in Campbell’s opinion was access to modern literature;127 although allowing undergraduates access to the public libraries of the university was also a priority of his. So frightened, he thought, had the university authorities now become and so intent on controlling what junior members read, that, although much criticized both within and outside Oxford, they continued with this “illiberal and mistaken policy”.128 Such restrictions he felt created an artificial and unnecessary divide between juniors and seniors and violated the educational ideal of Cicero, one of Oxford’s favourite classical authors, which saw a shared love of literature as an unbreakable bond between old and young.129 It is important to point out that it was by no means all, or even a majority of undergraduates who were producing works like these. However, the increasingly sophisticated expression of student grievances is a phenomenon which deserves to be recognized. It seems closely linked to a growing identification of junior members, not only with each other, but also with the university and a romantic ideal of student life as a search for truth.130

124 Campbell, Hints for Oxford, p. 5. 125 Ibid., 1. 126 Ibid., 43. J. Milton, Paradise Regained iv.322. 127 Ibid., 58. 128 Ibid., 59. 129 Ibid., 60. See Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta vii: “Haec studia adolescentiam alunt, senec- tutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugiam ac solatium praebent.” (“These studies are the food of youth, the delight of old age, the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity.”) 130 B. Batty, Passages in the Life of an Undergraduate. Edited by One of his Friends (London, 1847), p. 45, cited in Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates recognizable as such”, p. 174. 134 chapter three

Here the radicalism of French and German students in the years after the end of the Napoleonic wars seems to have had an important impact, particularly the kind of romantic nationalism which inspired many of the student fraternities which flourished in continental universities. The fact that renewed attempts by Oxford undergraduates to establish junior societies, most notably the Oxford Union Society, on the model of Cambridge131 in 1823, were met with the full force of senior resistance only served to strengthen junior resolve. In the first years of their existence, the Union Society were prevented from acquiring a permanent home and instead were hounded from one college to another by the authorities.132 A stronger sense of student identity was no doubt also strengthened by the fact that young men were coming to university at an ever later age, combined with the trend towards longer residence which extended the length of the student experience. In the years after 1800, matriculation rates also began to rise sharply, causing the undergraduate body as a whole to grow in size.133 It is my contention that it is in this atmosphere of burgeoning student journalism and generational revolt that we must look for the beginnings of a movement which has often been seen as conservative and counter- revolutionary. A significant number of those taking part in the junior critique of senior members in the 1810s and 1820s went on to become leading Tractarians, who would contribute in important ways to the movement’s chief periodical, the British Critic. Most clearly, we can see this in the case of Newman himself, whose early experiences as the editor of the Under- graduate prepared him for his later role in charge of the British Critic. The co-editor of the Undergraduate, John Bowden, likewise went on to become a committed Tractarian, writing five of the Tracts for the Times and publishing four major articles in the British Critic. James Shergold Boone, the author of the Oxford Spy, was another student journalist who went on to become associated with the Oxford Movement. As editor of the British Critic from January 1834, he directed the journal in the interests of the high-church Hackney Phalanx and, after 1836, when Newman promised to provide him with a fixed number of articles for each issue,

131 On the development of the Cambridge Union Society, see P. Cradock, Recollections of the Cambridge Union, 1815–1939 (Cambridge, 1953); for the problems which the Cam- bridge Union encountered with the university authorities, see Winstanley, Early Victorian Cambridge, pp. 25–8. 132 Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates recognizable as such”, p. 132. 133 Stone, “The Size and Composition of the Oxford Student Body 1580–1909”, pp. 6, 91; Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914, p. 125. the emergence of a junior reform programme 135 of the Tractarians.134 Charles William Stocker, who became a fellow of St John’s, also had important Tractarian connections, clearest perhaps in the support he showed for Newman in his campaigns to retain subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles at matriculation and to prevent the appointment of Renn Dickson Hampden to the Regius Professorship of Divinity in 1836. Although scholars of the Oxford Movement have often acknowledged the influence of romantic thought on the movement, this has usually been confined to the popularity of austerity and self-denial among leading Tractarians in the 1830s and 1840s. The next chapter will argue that the greatest legacy of romanticism for Tractarianism was the extent to which the movement conceived itself (and drew people to it) as a radical youth movement. Here, it will be suggested that the growing trend among junior members to publish their criticisms of the university authorities provided a major channel through which this spirit of generational revolt came to infiltrate the ranks of those who would go on to become important members of the Oxford Movement. As we have seen, it nurtured a growing sense of undergraduate identity, defined sharply against a body of senior members who were seen as endeavouring to stifle and control junior members. It also allowed them to hone their journalistic abilities and skills of controversy in preparation for the clashes of the future. When looking back to his own period as an undergraduate, it was precisely this atmosphere of discontent following the Statutes of 1800 and 1807 which E.B. Pusey remembered as the most formative in the development of his own views. “It was a memorable uprising”, he wrote; there was “a spirit of free inquiry: old institutions, accepted principles and beliefs were rudely and fearlessly investigated, and called upon to justify themselves at the bar of utility and reason . . . Authority, sole judge hitherto in questions intellectual, was disallowed.”135 In the second decade of the nineteenth century, future Tractarians like Newman and Boone were already engaged in a romantic struggle against authority. The dominant tone, the campaign for modern learning, was certainly different from (if not opposite to) that which would characterize the later writings of the Oxford Movement; however, alongside a concern for “pure” and unconstrained learning, it is possible to see in

134 S.A. Skinner, “Boone, James Shergold (1798–1859)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. 135 W. Tuckwell, Pre-Tractarian Oxford: A Reminiscence of the Oriel “Noetics” (London, 1909), p. 15. 136 chapter three the juvenile publications of future Tractarians, an equally strong enthusiasm for “pure” religion. In the Oxford Spy, for example, the combination appears throughout: Oh! What the lovely stream, the silent shade, The awful tow’rs which seem for Science made; Whose storied windows shed a holy light; If there Philosophy base chains has felt, Nor simple pure Religion ever dwelt; . . . But e’en Divinity becomes a trade, And they, who look the gravest, never pray’d.136 While Newman and Bowden were far more wary of making such accusations, declaring their belief that religion as a whole was not ‘corrupted’ at Oxford, they nonetheless displayed a deep concern that it remain ‘orthodox’ and firmly committed to that “pure and apostolical branch” of the catholic Church “established in these dominions.”137 Such concerns were not out of step with other student publications appearing at the time. Although it cannot with certainty be attributed to anyone who went on to hold Tractarian views, there appeared in 1822 a pamphlet entitled An Appeal to the Heads of the University of Oxford, by an Undergraduate which complained about the disservice paid to religion by compelling undergraduates to take communion in chapel.138 This was an issue which Newman was to raise repeatedly with the then Provost of Oriel, Edward Hawkins,139 when he became a tutor at the college in 1826.140 As Boone had argued in the Oxford Spy, the author of the Appeal asserted that the contempt felt by students towards senior members was increased by their perceived failure to display genuine religious feeling. He referred to “the disgust which is produced, even in the minds of the serious, when they perceive the ordinance is so profaned and abused”141 and criticized the fact that senior members were unaware of the strength of religious feeling among undergraduates. It only went to prove, he wrote, the “slight

136 [Boone], The Oxford Spy . . . Dialogue the First, pp. 9–10. 137 [Newman and Bowden], The Undergraduate, p. 27. 138 An Appeal to the Heads of the University of Oxford, by an Undergraduate (London, 1822). 139 It was, moreover, Hawkins who wrote a reply to the Appeal by an Undergraduate. See [E. Hawkins], A Letter to the Author of “An Appeal to the Heads of the University of Oxford” upon Compulsory Attendance at the Communion, by a Graduate (Oxford, 1822). See below pp. 143–4. 140 I.T. Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford, 1988), pp. 37–8. 141 An Appeal to the Heads of the University of Oxford, by an Undergraduate, p. 10. the emergence of a junior reform programme 137 connection which they [the heads of houses] have with the younger members of their colleges”.142 Such pamphlets contained the same combination of youthful self-confidence and religious zeal which was to characterize many Tractarian publications in the 1830s as well as the conviction that “pure” religion as well as “pure” scholarship belonged to the modern age. Referring to the obligation to attend the sacrament which dated back to Elizabethan times, the author of the Appeal wrote starkly, “[T]he cause of this system does not now exist . . . it was formerly a useful and politic institution, it has ceased to be so”. The confidence with which he wrote is marked: “Others, I trust, will be satisfied with my argument; and it cannot be long ere our superiors will become sensible of the extent of an abuse, which however it might have flourished in the 16th Century, is quite irrec- oncilable to the taste of the 19th.”143 Contrary to what Rothblatt and other historians have argued, the first third of the nineteenth century was far from seeing a consolidation of senior authority. Fears which senior members had entertained in the years of the French Revolution were not simply extinguished as a new generation of undergraduates accepted the new discipline of competitive examination. As we saw in the previous chapter, the authorities at Oxford were increasingly worried about the disaffection of the undergraduate population in the years after 1800. Some critics of the university, most notably, Edward Tatham, had predicted that the further tightening of the syllabus and examination conditions in 1807 would make the spectre of junior rebellion a reality. As this chapter has shown, Tatham was, in a certain sense, proved correct. Early-nineteenth-century Oxford may have witnessed no major outbreaks of student violence, not even on the scale of the Jacobite riots in the first half of the eighteenth century; however, it did see the emergence of a generation of undergraduates who were more united, self-aware and critical of the university authorities than any previously. Although the development of a student identity in this period has been noticed before, scholars have tended to confine their observations to the proliferation of student societies and the growing popularity of team sports.144 They have likewise tended to explain it as a necessary side-effect

142 An Appeal to the Heads of the University of Oxford, by an Undergraduate, p. 3. 143 Ibid., 10. 144 For the proliferation of student societies in general in this period, see Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates recognizable as such”, pp. 128–32; for the increasing popularity of student games, see Ibid., 122–5. 138 chapter three of the rising student age and the trend towards longer residence which affected both universities similarly. While both Oxford and Cambridge did indeed see the emergence of a more united student body, the growth of a critical discourse among junior members, which delivered increasingly sophisticated attacks upon the curriculum, examination system and general attitude of the university authorities, was a phenomenon largely restricted to Oxford. In contrast with Cambridge, where, in some cases, ambitious undergraduates worked together with enthusiastic tutors such as George Peacock to introduce the latest developments in analytical mathematics into the undergraduate curriculum, Oxford experienced a widening breach between students and their tutors over the issue of university reform. With more and more works addressed directly to them, junior members were increasingly drawn into the atmosphere of criticism which developed around the ‘new’ system in the years after its introduction in 1800. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, undergraduates and bachelors began themselves to take an active role in the debate, publishing their own views on reform and calling ever more loudly for a modern curriculum. What started with juvenile jesting at senior members in The Oxonian quickly developed into sophisticated satire in The Oxford Spy and The Undergraduate. The way in which the university reform discourse in these years is often presented, as being led by senior members and as tending to reinforce their authority, is misleading. Indeed, it became something of a generational battleground in which competing visions of the university were put forward. Nor were things to become any easier for senior members in the coming years. Although usually seen as counter-revolutionary in nature, the Oxford Movement, which dominated the university in the 1830s, needs also to be understood, I have suggested, as a radical youth movement which had its origins in the atmosphere of generational conflict which developed in the years after 1807. A significant number of leading Trac- tarians, including Newman himself, played a prominent role in the burgeoning culture of student journalism and, although mostly calling for modernizing reform in this earlier period, made clear their concern for ‘pure’ religion as well as ‘pure’ scholarship at the university. As will be seen in the next chapter, one of the biggest attractions of Tractarianism, despite its increasingly conservative stance on the syllabus and university theology, was its perceived youthful energy, which derived much strength from precisely the same romantic ideal of generational revolt which had inspired the student journalists a decade earlier. Chapter Four

NOETICS, TRACTARIANS AND THE PEAK OF JUNIOR INFLUENCE, 1824–1836

Some years ago now, Colin Matthew and P.B. Nockles correctly established the importance of the well-studied clash between the Noetics and Tractarians for the course of university reform at Oxford in the 1820s and 1830s. Both pointed to the fact that the two groups set out quite different visions of what kind of institution the university should be and, above all, how it should relate to church and state. They maintained, however, that an interest in reform on both sides was primarily the product of a set of worrying external events between 1828 and 1832, which finally forced Oxford to confront the need for change, which had dominated national politics for some years already. “With the repeal of the Test Acts, Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Act”, declared Nockles, “a dam burst and the ancient universities, Oxford especially, were exposed to potentially hostile secular influences as never before.”1 Under these circumstances, the Noetics and Tractarians are seen as representing within the university the two forces of liberal reform and conservative reaction, which were battling each other in the country at large. In the words of Colin Matthew, “The University of Oxford . . . faced in micro the challenge which the Brit- ish government faced in macro: was it possible both to preserve Anglican hegemony and to remain ‘National’?”2 While it is important to appreciate how Oxford responded to wider developments on the country at large, we must not, at the same time, lose sight of the internal context of the university when accounting for the course of reform in the 1820s and 1830s. As this chapter will argue, the clash between the Noetics and the Tractarians cannot be properly understood without placing it against the background of an increasingly confident and critical student body. Thus, it will be suggested that the Noetic interest in reform began considerably earlier than 1828 and was primarily designed to reassert senior authority in the face of unprecedented public attacks from undergraduates and bachelors. Even in the early 1820s,

1 Nockles, “An Academic Counter-Revolution”, 139. 2 Matthew, “Noetics, Tractarians, and the Reform of the University of Oxford”, 195. 140 chapter four it is possible to see the beginnings of a conservative backlash among certain senior members, including a number of leading Noetics such as Thomas Arnold and Augustus Hare, which grew considerably in strength in response to the proposed Examination Statute of 1824. This statute, it was widely believed, had been deliberately designed by the Hebdomadal Board (under the leadership of Vice-Chancellor, George William Hall) to appease junior frustrations by acceding to a number of demands which would have involved a considerable redistribution of power away from senior members. It was, above all, the perceived ability of the Noetics to restore senior authority in the face of this threat which allowed them to dominate reform discussions in the late 1820s. It will likewise be suggested that the success of the Tractarian movement is not fully understandable apart from this context of generational conflict. Like the Noetics, the Tractarians first gained influence within the university due to their perceived ability to heal the generational breach. In the wake of the crisis of 1828–32, their emphasis on obedience to established authority was exactly what senior members wanted to hear. How- ever, the junior-senior conflict had an even more direct impact on the Tractarians. Rather than simply representing an alternative or ‘counter- revolutionary’3 programme of reform, the movement deserves to be seen, in a number of important ways, as a continuation of the growing critical spirit among junior members visible, above all, in the culture of student journalism which developed in the 1810s and 20s. Although its most prominent members like Newman were no longer juniors (but rather fellows and tutors of colleges), a considerable number, as we saw in the previous chapter, had been among those to publish works critical of the university some ten years previously. As part of the Oxford Movement, their focus remained very much on attracting undergraduates, bachelors and junior MAs to their cause. Moreover, within a few years, they came to be seen by many, both within and outside Oxford, as a subversive youth movement, promoting ideas as radical and dangerous to the traditional university as anything proposed by the student journalists a decade before. In many ways, then, the period of Tractarian dominance in the 1830s deserves to be seen as the high point of junior influence over the university reform debate at Oxford.

3 Nockles, “An Academic Counter-Revolution”, 137. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 141

The Statute of 1824: The Beginnings of a Conservative Consensus

Contrary to the claim of Rothblatt that, following the defeat of Napo- leon, the acceptance of competitive examination by undergraduates meant that the authorities at Oxford no longer had to fear a challenge to their authority from junior members,4 it is clear that an atmosphere of mutual suspicion continued to exist in the 1820s. Central to this was the new-found sense of generational identity among junior members which expressed itself, above all, in the growing number of contributions to the reform debate and in the flourishing of student clubs and societies. As we saw in the previous chapter, the early 1820s witnessed a flurry of critical publications from undergraduates and bachelors which increased the pressure on senior members to find a new way of communicating with the student body. Nor did this growing generational unease go unnoticed outside the university. Commentators in a number of leading journals and newspapers from both sides of the political spectrum remarked on the growing confidence and rebellious attitude among junior members. In the previous chapter, we noticed the considerable difficulties encountered by the Oxford Union Society when it tried to arrange regular meetings at which to hold its debates.5 In 1824, in just its second year of existence, the Society fell foul, not only of the university authorities, but also of the conservative press, when one of its members, Samuel Wilberforce, who would himself go on to flirt with Tractarianism, defended the view that the dethronement of Charles I had been fully justified. Although the motion was ultimately defeated, the conservative newspaper, John Bull, made much of the affair, reporting that Wilberforce, together with his elder brother, Robert, had not only denounced the principle of monarchy, but proved themselves unchristian, “by making a direct attack on the Established Church”.6 Against this background of mutual suspicion, the early 1820s witnessed the beginnings of a conservative fight-back on the part of senior members, a new-found determination to wrest control of the reform debate back from the juniors; and driving this move to reassert senior authority were many who would go on to become prominent Noetics. Although most studies of the Noetics acknowledge their interest in university reform,

4 Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates recognizable as such”, p. 171. 5 See above, p. 134. 6 John Bull (1824), cited in E.B. Nicholson, “The Oxford Union”, Macmillan’s Magazine 28 (May/Oct. 1873), 568. 142 chapter four they rarely examine their involvement prior to the debate surrounding the 1830 Examination Statute in which leading members of the group such as Richard Whately, Baden Powell and Renn Dickson Hampden played important roles. By contrast, it will be suggested here that, although many of these key figures were not present at Oxford before 1825, it is nonetheless possible to find individual Noetics contributing much earlier to the debate, particularly in relation to the growing perception that the juniors were becoming ever more vehement in their attacks on the university. To some extent, the early Noetics with their close ties to Copleston had reason to feel directly targeted by the critiques of junior members. As the previous chapter has shown, one of the most prominent features of these attacks was criticism of Copleston himself, particularly in his role as defender of the 1800 Statute against the accusations of the Edinburgh Reviewers. Quotations from that famous contest littered the various productions of the juniors; indeed, it is probable that James Shergold Boone was caricaturing Copleston in The Oxford Spy dialogues of 1818.7 Others had targeted him more specifically in his role as Provost of Oriel. Such, for example, was Daniel Sandford, whose scurrilous attacks we have already examined.8 Unlike any of the previous attacks by junior members, Sandford found his answered. Augustus Hare, a young MA and fellow of New College, published an emotive riposte in 1822.9 Although not an Oriel man, Hare was closely connected to several leading Noetics, most notably Thomas Arnold and was a great admirer of Copleston.10 In his answer to Sandford, he donned the mantle of his hero, Copleston, claiming (as he had) that no one else was prepared to come forward.11 Once more, like Copleston, he was quick to rebut the charge of childishness. Oxford’s examinations, he argued, prepared youths better than any other training for the challenges

7 See above, p. 117. 8 See above, p. 130. 9 [A.W. Hare], Letter to Daniel K. Sandford . . . in Answer to the Strictures of the Edin- burgh Review on the Open Colleges of Oxford (Oxford, 1822). According to Sandford (Letter to Peter Elmsley, pp. 44–45), Hare had already been writing against himself and the Edin- burgh Review in the Oxford Review or Literary Censor before he penned the riposte to his article in the Edinburgh Review. 10 As early as 1814, while still an undergraduate, he had published a letter in support of the 1800 Statute in which he criticised his college friend, George Martin, for his opposition to the proposal that students from New College should be required to sit the public examinations like everyone else before receiving their degree. See [A.W. Hare], Letter to George Martin (Oxford, 1814). 11 [Hare], Letter to Daniel K. Sandford, p. 3. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 143 of manhood, providing the skills “which, throughout the whole career and struggle of life . . . must carry us to the goal we have in prospect”.12 Moving on to the particular object of Sandford’s scorn, the fellowship examinations at so-called ‘open’ colleges like Oriel, Hare presented them, employing Copleston’s notion of a ladder of learning, as “a step higher in the scale of difficulty, an advance from evolution to action”.13 Intellec- tual maturity was, he assured his readers, “the first point that an elector would wish to ascertain”.14 He went on to reverse the accusation of childishness, contrasting Sandford’s youth and inexperience15 with the wisdom of Copleston. “I shall be more disposed to listen patiently”, he wrote of Sandford, “when his temper and intellect have undergone the lustration necessary to procure them admission into the Sanctuary, where Philoso- phy sits enshrined.”16 Copleston, by contrast, was already there: “respectable, distinguished, esteemed for his learning by scholars, praised for his views of polity by statesmen”.17 Some historians have doubted the impact of the exchange between Sandford and Hare because they have seen it as an isolated incident.18 However, if we consider Hare’s response as marking the beginning of a backlash by seniors, it gains significantly in importance. Although Hare was criticized heavily for his intervention and nobody else responded directly to Sandford’s charges, it is likely that many senior members shared his anger. In the same year, Edward Hawkins, also a prominent Noetic, published a reply to another undergraduate critique, examined in the previous chapter, which condemned the practice of forcing undergraduates to take communion in chapel. Although a good deal more restrained in tone and language, Hawkins made clear his view that it was inappropriate for junior members to criticize publicly the decisions of college and university authorities. “[S]ome”, he wrote, “will be disposed to think that you have not adopted the best method for the attainment of your object.” Far better, if you “had submitted your remonstrance to them [the heads of houses] in private, instead of sending it forth from the press to be discussed by those members of the University who have any

12 [Hare], Letter to Daniel K. Sandford, p. 12. 13 Ibid., 21. 14 Ibid., 25. 15 Ibid., 40. Quoting the Merchant of Venice (4.1.220) sarcastically, he said to Sandford: “O wise young judge, how do I honour thee!” 16 Ibid., 51. 17 Ibid., 51. 18 See, for example, Brock, “The Oxford of Peel and Gladstone, 1800–1833”, p. 21. 144 chapter four time to bestow upon anonymous publications”.19 Other senior members, less directly connected with the Noetics, expressed similar views: Thomas Vowler Short, for example, who, as fellow and tutor of Christ Church, had almost certainly known Sandford when he had been an undergraduate at the college. In the same year as Hare and Hawkins entered the fray, Short published a Letter to the Dean of Christ Church, in which he highlighted the growing audacity of junior members and considered what changes might be made to the Examination Statute in order to restore senior authority.20 The typical undergraduate, he complained, presented himself at examination as an “opponent” in a debate, “rather than one on whom we were about to pass . . . judgment”.21 In conclusion, he called upon the heads to amend the current statute in close consultation with “the principal college tutors”.22 Less than two years later, in the spring of 1824, a new Examination Stat- ute was indeed framed by the Hebdomadal Board and submitted to Con- vocation. However, it was the very lack of consultation which provoked a large-scale attack upon its provisions, with many senior members feeling it had been deliberately intended to undermine their authority and appease junior frustrations. Following the earlier criticisms of Edward Tatham and the Edinburgh Reviewers, one of the most consistent demands of junior members had been for greater attention to be paid to modern subjects such as natural science and mathematics. The new statute, as drawn up by Vice-Chancellor, George William Hall,23 and his supporters, proposed to give much greater prominence to mathematics in the examination syllabus; the compulsory study of Aldrich’s Logic, introduced in 1800, and particularly unpopular with juniors, was to be replaced with the Ele- ments of Euclid. In addition, the mathematical examination was, for the first time, to be administered by a separate board of examiners and to take place three weeks later, allowing candidates wishing to specialize in mathematics valuable extra time for preparation. More generally, there was proposed a redistribution of responsibility away from college tutors to

19 [Hawkins], A Letter to the Author of ‘An Appeal to the Heads of the University of Oxford’, pp. 3–4. 20 T.V. Short, A Letter to the Very Rev. Dean of Christ Church on the State of Public Exami- nation in the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1822). 21 Ibid., 17. 22 Ibid., 25. 23 George William Hall had acquired a particular reputation for leniency and for a desire to please junior members within his own college, Pembroke. See his obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine 21 (February 1844), p. 202. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 145 the candidates themselves when it came to deciding what class of degree they would be considered for. Previously, a candidate’s tutor had written a commendatory letter to the examiner, stating the class which he felt his pupil could most realistically achieve. From now on, the classes for which candidates would be entered would be determined exclusively by the list of books which they themselves submitted to the Examiners. There is evidence to suggest that we should link the earlier publications by Hare, Hawkins and Short with the more general opposition to the new statute; for resistance to a policy of junior appeasement was to be spear- headed both in and after 1824 by leading members of the Noetic School including Hawkins, and with whom both Hare and Short were closely connected. Thus, Thomas Arnold, who was an intimate friend of Hare’s, and also well known to Short,24 was the first to publish his views on the statute when it was proposed to Convocation on 8 March. Arnold had much in common with his friend Hare. He too was a young MA with experience of being a college fellow; he also shared Hare’s deep admiration for Copleston.25 But perhaps the greatest practical similarity was Arnold’s conviction that, in spite of his relative youth, even heads of houses must be stood up to when they proposed measures contrary to the university’s interests. “I have been actuated by no other feeling”, he wrote, “but the sincerest interest in the welfare and honour of our University; and in the strength of my affection for her, I will not yield to the highest or oldest of her sons, with whom on other grounds I should never presume of raising myself into any the most distant comparison.”26 He was particularly frustrated at the way in which a statute, whose sole aim had been to relieve the university’s overworked examiners, had been hijacked by those frightened of junior rebellion and turned into a complete redrafting of the system introduced in 1800. “Let us confine the present Statute to its present object”, he wrote, “relieving the Examining Masters from a burden which

24 Thomas Vowler Short was a close friend of William Buckland’s, the geologist to whom Arnold was related by marriage (Arnold’s sister had married Buckland’s brother); both men regularly attended Buckland’s lectures at Oxford in the company of other leading Noetics including Edward Copleston and Richard Whately. Indeed, these men have all been identified in a lithograph depicting a lecture of Buckland’s in 1823. See J.M. Edmonds and J.A. Douglas, “William Buckland, F.R.S. (1784–1856) and an Oxford Geological Lecture, 1823”, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 30:2 ( January 1976), 155–163. 25 A.P. Stanley, Letters and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. Vol. II (Boston, 1862) p. 197. 26 [T. Arnold], Address to the Members of Convocation on the Expediency of the Proposed Statute (Oxford, 1824), p. 4. For attribution to Thomas Arnold see the copy in the Bodleian G.A. Oxon. C. 40 (23). 146 chapter four was become too great for them.”27 To Arnold, the statute seemed rather “intended for a general reform of . . . the system of our Oxford examinations”, than designed to correct particular abuses.28 As a package of measures he denounced it as “premature” and “partial”.29 The provision which most concerned Arnold was the replacement of Aldrich’s Logic with the Elements of Euclid. As we have seen, opposition to the compulsory study of logic had been a prominent feature of many junior critiques including Sandford’s. Arnold feared that the decision to do away with Aldrich would “in time amount to an actual exclusion of Logic” from the university and for no better reason than the “general out- cry which has . . . been raised . . . against the usefulness of that study”.30 He shared the conviction of Copleston and S.T. Coleridge31 that logic should constitute the final stage in a classical education designed to form the “manly” intelligence: To minds already habituated . . . to analyze language grammatically the new view of it which is presented to them by learning to analyze it logically ought to complete their full acquaintance with its construction and uses . . . Seeing that all human knowledge is conveyed through the medium of language . . . I do not see what study can be of more general or greater use, than one which familiarizes the mind on its first entrance into active life with the nature of this universal instrument.32 He offered his own experience as an undergraduate to demonstrate the truth of this assertion, explaining how his study of logic had been, together with Aristotle, the crowning glory of his classical career: I can never forget the new world to which my mind was . . . introduced, when I first became acquainted . . . with the treatises of Aristotle and with Logic. Each seemed to throw light on the other; and each opened a field of thought and inquiry to which the mind had been before an almost total stranger. Every book, every conversation . . . furnished food for this new exercise of the faculties; for where can we go to find any thing unconnected

27 [Arnold], Address to the Members of Convocation, p. 2. 28 Ibid., 1. 29 Ibid., 2. 30 Ibid., 2. 31 See S.T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character (1824) (Burlington, 1829). On p. lviii, he wrote that the book had been “especially designed for the studious Young at the close of their education or on their first entrance into the duties of manhood and the rights of self-government.” 32 [Arnold], Address to the Members of Convocation, p. 3. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 147

with human nature or with language? whereas the elements of Euclid lead to nothing at all.33 Nor was Arnold alone. Although many writers did not wish to give their names, they nonetheless identified themselves as senior members of Oxford. Sharing many of Arnold’s concerns, they represent the first signs of an emerging consensus among senior members about the need to re-establish control over the university reform debate. A prominent feature of many of these publications was a deep respect for the framers of the 1800 Statute, whose primary aim, as we saw in chapter two, had been to safeguard senior authority; by contrast, the current Hebdomadal Board was seen as seeking nothing less than the destruction of the system which it had established. “The memory of those who framed the old and golden statute”, one writer declared, “is yet fresh in the minds of many to whom its repeal is now proposed.” “For many years”, he observed sadly, “the university has not been blest with such governors as these” and “it may be many years more ere we shall see their like again.”34 Once more, this writer pointed to the inability of the Board to curb the growing audacity of junior members and interpreted the provisions of the proposed statute as a poorly disguised attempt to appease their frustrations. “It is a fact”, he declared, that “extravagance meets with little restraint” here; “and that a great part of the young men are indulging in luxuries unknown in their fathers’ houses.”35 The chief aim of the 1800 Statute, he declared, drawing heavily on Copleston’s rhetoric in the Replies, had been to promote manly emulation through competitive examination.36 This aim, he maintained, had been sadly perverted in recent years by the Board’s practice of encouraging students to overestimate their abilities, thereby promoting not manliness, but arrogance and disrespect for established authority. “The accumulation of labour” which the examiners now faced was due wholly to the “system of young men taking up books either in quantity or quality beyond their grasp.”37 Such a scheme, “offer[ed] in every branch a bonus to the exhibition of assurance” rather than patient study and sound learning.38

33 [Arnold], Address to the Members of Convocation, p. 3. 34 Reflections on the Project of Changing the Present Examination Statute Respectfully Addressed to the Members of Convocation (Oxford, 1824), p. 8. 35 Ibid., 9. 36 Ibid., 3. 37 Ibid., 7. 38 Ibid., 8. Another writer complained similarly of the growing arrogance of undergraduates who went up for examination with far too many books. He blamed this, in particular, 148 chapter four

Another pamphlet expressed concern about the negative effect which junior rebelliousness would have on the character of future Anglican clergymen. Like many of the other writers, this author blamed the Heb- domadal Board for this situation. By failing to check undergraduate behaviour, they were effectively encouraging junior members “to disdain the controul [sic], and make a mock of the advice and rebuke of their cen- sors and rulers”. “Extravagance and insubordination are most venial vices in the eyes of young men”, he declared, “and are therefore most infec- tious . . . [A]ssuredly a rein cannot be too soon or too effectually placed on their passions and their conduct.”39 Moreover, he stressed that not only undergraduates, but bachelors as well, must be subject to an effective discipline. We remember what a prominent role BAs had taken in the attacks of junior members on the university. In the years between graduation and ordination, he declared, “a young man is in most . . . cases left to his own discretion, and wholly free from any official guidance, both as to his conduct and studies. He may spend the whole of this time and perilous interim in doing nothing, or far worse than nothing”.40 Although such pamphlets were attacked by some junior members,41 opposition to the statute in Convocation proved such that it was overwhelmingly rejected not only on its first proposal in March 1824, but also on its second reading in May. Faced with such an effective resistance from senior members, the Board made significant amendments to the statute before proposing it for a third time in June. Although the scheme to separate examinations in classics and mathematics remained, on the ground

upon the growing popularity of private tuition and begged private tutors for their help to reduce this unpleasant tendency among examination candidates. See Bodleian G.A. Oxon. C. 45 (52). Dated 25 May 1829. 39 An Enquiry into the Studies and Discipline, Adopted in the Two English Universities, as Preparatory to Holy Orders, in the Established Church: in a Letter, by a Graduate (London, 1824), pp. 23, 14. 40 Ibid., 26–7. 41 See, for example, A Letter to the Author of an Enquiry into the Studies and Disciplines of the two English Universities (London, 1824), p. 28. This author tries to give a very different view of the current state of Oxford youth; their enthusiasm for debate comes only from their unprecedented talent and moral earnestness and a genuine desire to reform the place. See p. 15. “Enquire at Oxford . . . and you will learn that there never was a time, in which there prevailed a more laudable ambition to cultivate, and to excel in every branch of study which the Universities require; you will find too that there never was a time in which they were more brilliantly stored with talent among their junior members. The days when “expensive clothes, wine-parties, hunting &c” exerted their combined influence to degrade the moral and intellectual character of their victims, always exaggerated, are passing away.” noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 149 that it would give more time to examiners, the suggestion that a candidate’s class be determined purely by his choice of books without the input of his tutor was dropped; although there were still to be certain circumstances in which the pupil could appeal to the examiner over the head of his tutor. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many senior members remained unhappy, convinced that the Board was still determined “to force a Stat- ute upon the University against the wishes of Convocation”.42 One writer, styling himself “A Senior Member of Convocation”, argued that tutors would actually be worse off under the revised statute than before. “The provision”, he wrote, “which still gives to the Candidate the power of appealing from his Tutor’s judgment, and, in fact, of nullifying it . . . is so obviously obnoxious, that we must not be surprised if Tutors should, after all, be reluctant to comply with the provisions of a Statute, which brings them before a tribunal which is degrading, and may expose them to the charge of incompetency.”43 Another writer argued that tutors would suffer from an even heavier workload under the provisions of the revised statute. With particular reference to the proposal to increase the number of yearly examinations from two to three, he suggested that tutors like himself would have even less time to add to their own stock of knowledge; a situation which could only damage junior-senior relations further. “The chief evil connected with our present system”, he wrote, is the drudgery to which Tutors are constantly exposed, which prevents them from acquiring much fresh information for themselves, and therefore from communicating anything like liberal instruction to their pupils. This would be augmented by nearly one half . . . by increasing the number of examinations, and the only term which is now left to us for personal improvement would be . . . taken away.44 Other critics made the same point in satirical pamphlets. One such pur- ported to advertise a soon-to-be-published “History” of the 1824 Statute.45 Among its contents were listed chapters “On the expediency of laying a new responsibility on tutors”, “On the advantages of placing their judgment

42 To the Members of Convocation by a Member of Convocation (Oxford, 15 June 1824), p. 2. 43 To the Members of Convocation by a Senior Member of Convocation (Oxford, 17 June 1824), pp. 1–2. 44 To the Members of Convocation by a Member of Convocation (Oxford, 15 June 1824), p. 2. 45 In the Press, and Speedily will be Published, An Account of the Proceedings Relative to the Attempt to Change the Examination Statute of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1824), p. 3. 150 chapter four under the immediate control of the Examiners” as well as the likely effect of these measures “On the state of discipline”.46

The Emergence of a Noetic Reform Programme, 1825–1829

With opposition like this, it is little surprise that the amended statute was also rejected when it was put to Convocation on 15 June 1824. This effectively ended any hopes the Hebdomadal Board might have had of introducing radical changes into the current system. After several months, a watered-down version of the statute was returned to Convocation in late February 1825. All controversial provisions had been removed, including the replacement of logic with the Elements of Euclid and the pupil’s right to appeal to the examiner over the head of his tutor. Instead, as Arnold and others had hoped, the statute confined itself to the issue of how best to reduce the burden on examiners.47 While this was, above all, a victory for the many senior members who had opposed the earlier forms of the statute, it was also a vindication of the emerging Noetic position. Although, with the exceptions of Hare and Arnold, it is difficult to identify individual Noetics who took part, the opinions expressed in many of the contributions shared strong similarities with the views expressed by these two men, above all, a deep admiration for Copleston and the framers of the 1800 Statute. Moreover, we can see, in the months and years following, the emergence of a coherent Noetic position centred on the need for a new examination statute designed to reassert the authority of senior members. Unlike the 1800 Statute, however, which had sought to increase senior control over junior members with little regard for how the changes might affect the education of the latter, the Noetic position was in no way hostile to the juniors or dismissive of the important responsibility

46 An Account of the Proceedings Relative to the Attempt to Change the Examination Stat- ute of the University of Oxford, p. 4. 47 G.R.M. Ward and J. Heywood (eds.), Oxford University Statutes Vol. II (London, 1851), p. 116: “for many reasons, and especially now that the number of young members of the University is so great, in consequence of which we have observed that an unfair amount of care and labour is thrown on the examiners, it has pleased the University to repeal the Statute which was passed on that subject in the year of our Lord 1809, and to substitute the present statute in its room”; p. 131 shows that the Statute passed in 1826 was similarly confined to the issue of relieving the work of the examiners; the only change it made (p. 132) being to increase the number of weeks after the Literae Humaniores examination that the mathematics examination would take place from 1 to 3; in the Statute of 1840 regarding the appointment of examiners, the statutes of 1825 and 1826 are both referred to as restricting themselves to this issue (p. 224). noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 151 with which the university was invested for their intellectual and moral training. Above all, they advocated a return to the Coplestonian notion of a classical education as a series of increasingly challenging stages, to be completed by students as they progressed, slowly but surely, from boyhood to manhood. A good impression of the developing Noetic position may be gathered from a new university magazine which appeared shortly after the watered- down version of the statute was passed in February 1825. Although published anonymously, there is good reason to assume that the Oxford Quarterly Magazine was a product of the emerging Noetic school. Of particular relevance here is the fact that the magazine’s creators were senior members of a particular college,48 deeply versed in the religious and moral philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,49 and convinced of the need for moderate liberal reform and “the promotion of useful knowledge”.50 The emphasis placed on the importance of the latest techniques in biblical criticism also suggests a strong Noetic influence.51 What is particularly notable about the magazine is its willingness to engage with junior members expressing critical views of the university. As stated in the first number, It is to the younger members of the University that we would here more especially address ourselves; to those, who in the eagerness of youthful ardour are ready to overleap the boundaries set around them by the discreet wisdom of our forefathers, and to tax the studies of this place as obsolete and insufficient in preparing men for the world.52 In particular, they intended the magazine to act as a forum for the expression of undergraduate opinion, albeit under the careful control of senior members. “Our main object”, they declared, “will be to present to the members of the University . . . an amusing and instructive Miscellany which

48 Oxford Quarterly Magazine 1:2 ( June 1825), 2. It is possible that Oriel College is referred to here. However, the majority of Oriel senior members who would go on to become leading Noetics were absent from Oxford in early 1825. Only Edward Copleston and Edward Hawkins were in regular residence. However, also present was John Henry Newman, who was, for a time in the 1820s, a prominent Noetic protégé. It is at least possible that New- man, who had a history of editing university magazines (viz. The Undergraduate), was involved in the production of the similarly short-lived Oxford Quarterly Magazine. 49 Oxford Quarterly Magazine 1:1 (March 1825), 3, 5. 50 Ibid., 3. 51 See the two articles on “Principles of Biblical Criticism and Translation” in Oxford Quarterly Magazine 1:1 (March 1825), 104–120 and 1:2 ( June 1825), 94–112. 52 “Oxford and its Studies”, Oxford Quarterly Magazine 1:1 (March 1825), 1. 152 chapter four will give free, but not licentious, utterance to the active spirits of youth.”53 Respect for senior members and the university authorities as a whole was a must; if students wanted their views to be heard, they must avoid at all costs what the magazine’s creators termed that “inflation and pompous arrogance, which puff up the sciolist and smatterer, which embolden the boy to prate” and which had characterized the wave of unsolicited junior publications in recent years.54 That the magazine had some success in attracting disgruntled juniors seems clear from the inclusion of an article showcasing translations of the German playwright Schiller’s Philosophic Letters by the future poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, an undergraduate at Pembroke, who was, at this time, an ardent admirer of Shelley and openly praised the French Revolution.55 For their own part, the magazine’s creators planned to use its pages to counter the image of the university as a place of out-dated, childish education, in their words, to “establish the fact, that Oxford, by a due mixture of the ancient with the modern . . . does fit her disciples for the world”.56 In articles contained in the first (and only) two numbers they laid out a view of Oxford education very close to that which the Noetics would come to espouse a few years later. In particular, they expressed the same determination to follow a careful via media between excessive reform and conservative reaction. “We are not so old”, they declared, “as to laud exclusively times gone by, but we have so far extended our observations over systems and men, as not, through ignorance to bow implicitly to contemporary opinion . . . [T]his is precisely the intermediate ground we wish to take.”57 Key to this positioning was a reiteration, and indeed, a strengthening of the rhetoric employed by Copleston in the Replies when he had endeavoured to convince the Edinburgh Reviewers that Oxford was not afraid of modern studies. However, this time, the junior members themselves were the target. “We will now apply ourselves”, the magazine declared, “to the . . . congenial task of pointing out to our younger readers the enlarged course of studies which Oxford unfolds to those who are disposed to avail themselves of the opportunities which she offers.”58 Just as Copleston had stressed the “manly and generous discipline” which Oxford provided, so

53 “Oxford and its Studies”, 5. 54 Ibid., 6. 55 See [T.L. Beddoes], “Philosophic Letters, by Schiller”, Oxford Quarterly Magazine 1:2 ( June 1825), 168–180. 56 “Oxford and its Studies”, 5. 57 Ibid., 2. 58 Ibid., 3. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 153 the magazine praised its “expansive nature and consequent suitableness to the existing needs of society”.59 In another article, there appeared an almost perfect echo of Copleston’s student-plant metaphor.60 Summing up their programme of reform in words strongly reminiscent of the Replies, they expressed their desire to put forward “general principles . . . by which, in a course of public education, the passions of youth may be controlled, and their minds turned to moral and religious excellence”.61 A greater sense of unity and coherence among members of the Noetic school can indeed be seen in the wake of the 1825 Statute. Before the backlash which was to come in the second half of the year, Thomas Arnold declared his hope in the Quarterly Review that Oxford would now be free to set its house in order with a mature and well-considered set of reforms. The root of junior rebelliousness, he maintained, was a fundamental lack of respect for tutors which had been growing in the decades since 1800. The burden of preparing pupils for finals and carrying out the duties of examiners had left tutors with no time to improve their own knowledge much beyond that of their pupils. Coupled with their relatively young age it had become increasingly difficult for tutors to maintain the respect of junior members. “From the unvarying and unceasing nature of their occupations”, he wrote, “they are wholly unable to devote themselves to literature; and that commencing their career early in life . . . their minds become early jaded and worn out . . . they often retire with intellects little, if at all, advanced by advancing years.” “The consequence”, he concluded, “has been the converting of our universities into great schools.”62 Outside the university, however, many commentators did not agree. They had backed the juniors’ demands for change and were bitterly dis- appointed by the apparent lack of reform. One of the first attacks came in August, from the pen of Henry Brougham, a leading figure in the new London University. Writing in the Edinburgh Review, he lamented the fact that, twenty-five years after the reforms of 1800, the grip of the church upon Oxford’s teaching and syllabus was stronger than ever. “Ecclesias- tics”, he wrote, “have continued to retain the same exclusive power over

59 “Oxford and its Studies”, 4. 60 “The Vicinity of Oxford”, Oxford Quarterly Magazine 1:1 (March 1825), 189. Instead of “saplings tak[ing] their full spread, and send[ing] forth their vigorous shoots in all the boldness and variety of nature”, we have the “cultivation of the human talents, resembling the training of the British oak, which is formed to shoot out and sustain the strongest branches in every direction.” 61 “Education of the Clergy”, Oxford Quarterly Magazine 1:1 (March 1825), 10. 62 [T. Arnold], “Early Roman History”, Quarterly Review 63 ( June 1825), 91–2. 154 chapter four education, long after they have . . . become . . . in many respects, far less adapted than the laity to perform the habit of instructors.”63 Quoting Bacon’s seventeenth-century critique of the university, he lamented the fact that “the studies of men” would remain “confined, and pinned down to the writings of certain authors; from which, if any man happens to differ, he is presently reprehended as a Disturber and Innovator”.64 Insight- fully, Brougham linked this reassertion of conservatism with the fears of youth rebellion which the spectre of continental revolution continued to raise in the minds of senior members. Their authority, “like everything else”, he declared, “has been fearfully shaken by the glorious events which have happened in both hemispheres since the American Revolu- tion, and which are preparing, slowly indeed, but surely and safely, the emancipation of mankind from the thraldom of ignorance, prejudice and intolerance”.65 Unless Oxford stopped treating her students as children, he argued, and, like the Scottish universities, adopted a system of liberal discipline combined with a course of modern studies, relations between junior and senior members would only get worse.66 In reply to Brougham’s stinging attack, no less a figure than Copleston himself responded with a full-length reply in the Quarterly Review in December 1825.67 The Noetics, as a group, were ebullient after their success in resisting the 1824 Statute and keen to give new publicity to their reform ideas. Unlike the Replies, in which, as we saw in the second chapter,68 the rhetoric of reform was hedged around with considerable fear and mistrust, Copleston’s commitment to reform was now much more confidently stated. The keynote of his article was a determination to pursue a middle way between the kind of radical reform which the Noet- ics had feared from the 1824 Statute and the conservative reaction which had driven the framers of 1800. Thus Copleston stressed that Oxford was not against reform per se, merely that “of the unmeasured headstrong kind

63 [H. Brougham], “The Proposal for Founding an University in London considered. By an Oxonian”, Edinburgh Review 42:84 (August 1825), 348–9. 64 [Brougham], “The Proposal for Founding an University in London considered”, 351. See Bacon, Novum Organum xc: “Studia enim hominum in ejusmodi locis in quorundam authorum scripta, veluti in carceres, conclusa sunt; a quibus si quis dissentiat, continuo ut homo turbidus et rerum novarum cupidus corripitur.” 65 [Brougham], “The Proposal for Founding an University in London considered”, 349. 66 Ibid., 353. 67 [E. Copleston], “A Letter to Mr. Brougham on the Subject of a London University, together with Suggestions respecting the Plan”, Quarterly Review 33:65 (December 1825), 257–74. 68 See above, pp. 97–8. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 155 which, reckless of consequences, as having nothing at stake, aims only at immediate triumph”.69 The university did not seek, he argued, to prevent students from thinking for themselves, but merely asked them to submit to an age-appropriate discipline and allow themselves to be guided, through a well-regulated and liberal course of studies, towards intellectual and moral manhood. To divest university education of its quasi-parental character and argue that its highest aim was “the mere acquisition of knowledge”, would result in an even greater “want of controul and inspection”, he maintained.70 He condemned the plan proposed for the new London University of public lectures, unsupported by tutorial instruction, as tending to separate junior and senior members and to create the kind of dangerous rift which Oxford had of late experienced. By contrast, he urged his own university to build on the strengths of its tutorial system, to bind junior and senior members together in “a voluntary association of gentlemen, in which a graduation of authority is maintained, where a close personal connexion subsists between each younger member and some one more advanced in years, while all are united in a common bond of attachment to the whole community”.71 In the months following the passage of the watered-down statute in February 1825, Copleston had done much behind the scenes to consolidate the Noetic position at Oxford. Most importantly, he had persuaded the university’s Chancellor, Lord Grenville, to recall his former pupil and fellow Noetic, Richard Whately, as the new Principal of St. Alban Hall.72 On his return, Whately used his influence to have two other Noetic protégés appointed to positions of importance: in 1825 Nassau Senior to the newly- created Drummond Professorship of Political Economy and Samuel Hinds to the Vice-Principalship of St. Alban Hall.73 With Whately’s appointment, there were now two leading Noetics on the Hebdomadal Board.74 In the

69 [Copleston], “A Letter to Mr. Brougham”, 258. 70 Ibid., 260–1. 71 Ibid., 264. 72 R. Brent, “Whately, Richard (1787–1863)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006. 73 F.D. Roberts, The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians (Stanford, 2002), p. 86; B.H. Blacker, “Hinds, Samuel (1793–1872)”, rev. H.C.G. Matthew, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008. 74 As became clear in March 1829 when the Hebdomadal Board appointed a committee to discuss a new Examination Statute, the Noetics could also count on the support of Philip Nicholas Shuttleworth, the Whiggish and liberal Anglican Warden of New College who was friends with several prominent Noetics including Baden Powell and Blanco White (Tuckwell, Pre-Tractarian Oxford, pp. 219, 240). 156 chapter four next few years, before his appointment as Bishop of Llandaff in 1827, Copleston was again active in securing positions for many other leading Noetics. On his initiative Joseph Blanco White was given his MA and made an honorary member of Oriel in 1826.75 In 1827, Baden Powell was ele- vated to the Savilian Chair of Geometry on Copleston’s recommendation.76 Through Copleston’s actions, Noetic influence at Oxford continued to grow even after his departure. Thus he was instrumental in securing the election of Edward Hawkins as his successor in the Oriel Provostship, who would, in turn, ensure appointments for other leading members of the school, most notably, Renn Dickson Hampden, as Member of the Board of Examiners for BA in 1829 and, later, as tutor of Oriel.77 In addition to securing appointments at Oxford, Copleston encouraged his Noetic friends to promote their views on university reform in books and pamphlets. Most significantly, he convinced Whately to compose a new and updated handbook of logic for use in Oxford’s final examination. This work, which was published to great acclaim in 1826 in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, was doubly important for the Noetic cause. On the one hand, it removed the chief objection raised against logic in 1824 by offering an updated and coherent alternative to Aldrich’s compendium;78 on the other, it provided Whately with the opportunity to address a much wider audience, not only on the importance of logic, but also on the advantages of the Noetic ideal of university education. In particular, he directed the book towards Oxford’s junior members, revealing once more a strong desire on the part of the Noetics to win over the university’s discontented undergraduates.79 In the preface, Whately linked the poor reputation of logic among students with the growing levels of disrespect shown to college tutors.80 Logic, he argued, suffered primarily from the fact that, although required for the ordinary degree, it formed no compulsory part of the examination for

75 G.M. Murphy, “White, Joseph Blanco (1775–1841)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biog- raphy, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Oct 2005. 76 Brent, “Copleston, Edward (1776–1849)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. 77 R. Brent, “Hampden, Renn Dickson (1793–1868)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biog- raphy, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Oct 2006. 78 Indeed it became the standard logic textbook in use at the university for the next twenty years, only to be replaced by J.S. Mill’s System of Logic. 79 R. Whately, Elements of Logic (London, 1826), p. xxii: “I have addressed myself to various classes of students, from the most uninstructed tyro to the furthest-advanced Logician.” 80 Ibid., xiii, xxi. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 157 honours. Its profile could only be raised by making it a specialist study, an indispensable ‘passport’ to success in the schools.81 College tutors, he argued, suffered similarly from a lack of specialization. Using a popular Noetic argument, he suggested that student disrespect stemmed primarily from a suspicion that tutors taught too many subjects from an inadequate stock of knowledge. By focusing their attention on specific studies, their work-load would be reduced and their reputation with their pupils much improved. At the same time, however, he was careful to stress the conservative aims of Noetic reform. Thus students were warned that logic should not be used “solely or chiefly for polemical purposes”, particularly when discussing religion.82 We should “abstain”, he wrote, “during this our state of childhood, from curious speculations on subjects in which even the ablest of human beings can but ‘see through a glass dimly’ ”.83 Whately was, moreover, at pains to identify his Logic as part of a wider Noetic project. He dedicated the work to Copleston in an elaborate opening letter, declaring his influence to have been so great that he felt he could “hardly consider myself as more than half the Author”.84 Elsewhere he expressed his gratitude for the substantial assistance he received from Nassau Senior and John Henry Newman, at this time a fellow of Oriel and Noetic protégé.85 He also referred to the valiant defence of logic which had been mounted by many of Oxford’s senior members (including a number of prominent Noetics) during the resistance to the proposed statute of 1824.86 The book itself was seized on by others desirous of promoting the Noetic cause: Samuel Hinds, for example, reprinted an edited compendium of it in 1827.87 It also paved the way for more ambitious Noetic collaborations such as the setting up of the London Review, a quarterly periodical founded by Whately and Nassau Senior in 1829 with Blanco White as editor. Designed, in the words of Richard Brent, to give the Noetics “a metropolitan voice”, it was a sign of the group’s new-found confidence and coherence.88

81 Whately, Elements of Logic, p. xix. 82 Ibid., xxix. 83 Ibid., 297. 84 Ibid., iii. 85 Ibid., vi–vii. 86 Ibid., xviii. 87 S. Hinds, Introduction to Logic: from Dr. Whately’s ‘Elements of Logic’ (Oxford, 1827). 88 Brent, “Whately, Richard (1787–1863)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004. 158 chapter four

The practice of addressing their ideas to junior members in works like Whately’s Logic appears to have had a degree of success. In contrast with the earlier publications of juniors, those appearing in the late 1820s included several which supported the Noetic position. In 1826, W.C. Townsend, a twenty-two-year-old bachelor from Queen’s, inspired by Copleston’s recent performance in the Quarterly, offered his own reply to Brougham’s attack and to another hostile critique which appeared in the Westminster Review in July 1825.89 He was particularly offended by the charge in the latter article that Oxford’s senior members were involved in a “conspiracy”90 to deprive undergraduates of an “adult” education91 and by the suggestion that students should overthrow their authority by force.92 From his decision to call his pamphlet, “A Reply to the Charges Adduced Against the University”, it seems likely that he was consciously emulating Copleston. Indeed, he saluted the Provost’s famous Reply of 1810 as “one of the severest floggings on record in the annals of literary castigations”.93 He then proceeded to argue passionately for the Noetic ideal of university education, based on the twin pillars of classical studies and tutorial instruction. Classical studies, he declared, “store the student with useful ideas and agreeable images . . . strengthen the judgment, the memory, the imagination”,94 while the “rudiments of religion” cultivated the moral sense.95 He praised the tutors, likewise, as “most able

89 W.C. Townsend, The Paean of Oxford, A Poem; to which is prefixed, A Reply to the Charges Adduced Against the University in the Recent Numbers of the Edinburgh and West- minster Reviews (London, 1826), p. 37: In addition, Townsend cited other hostile articles including: “Regrets of a Cantab”, London Magazine New Series, No. XII (December 1825), 437–66; “The Cambridge University. Westminster, Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews”, London Magazine New series, No. XIII (February 1826), 229–42; “The London University”, Monthly Magazine New Series, Vol. I, No. 2 (February 1826), 152–8. A review of Townsend praised his reply as “strong and manly, evincing much reading and an intimate acquaintance with the subject.” The Imperial Magazine 10 (1828), 574. 90 “Present System of Education”, Westminster Review 4:7 ( July 1825), 153–4: Cf. the comment on p. 153 that Oxford had failed utterly in its parental role. “It is not an Alma Mater, but a Harpy and a robber.” 91 Ibid., 154–5; cf. Ibid., 152. where the reviewer denounces Oxford’s syllabus as childish, nothing but “Ovid and Catullus, Homer . . . and rowing boats”. 92 Ibid., 172: “It is by heresy and rebellion that we shall at last shame and reform, if we do not succeed in abolishing, the monopoly. While it remains, we shall never learn but what our fathers have learned; for the Greek, the system, the Church, the monopoly, are but one.” 93 Townsend, The Paean of Oxford, p. 25. On p. 133, he also praises Copleston’s friend and fellow Noetic, the geologist, William Buckland. 94 Ibid., 2–3. 95 Ibid., 5. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 159 instructors”96 and testified to “the thorough esteem, and profound venera- tion which so many scholars feel for the system of tuition, and tutors at Oxford”.97 Quoting from Samuel Parr’s Spital Sermon of 1800, he applauded “the force of established rules in producing early habits of regularity and decorum . . . the strong though easy yoke that is thrown over the impetuosity of youth”.98 Just as Copleston had done, he threw the charge of childishness back on to the university’s critics. “The founders . . . of colleges”, he declared, “never intended them to feed children with milk and Latin, or to provide for authors at the breast. It must be reserved for the new London University . . . to produce . . . infant prodigies” for the wonder of the age.99 On several occasions, Townsend urged like-minded juniors to speak out and defend their university.100 One bachelor who took up the cause was James White, a recent graduate of Pembroke College. In an 1828 article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, called “Three Years at Oxford”, he refuted the accusation of hostile critics that the university curriculum of classical studies limited students’ academic development. Far from stunt- ing intellectual growth, he argued, Oxford classics guided undergraduates slowly but surely towards intellectual and moral manhood. While the typical undergraduate was somewhat idle and irresponsible in his first year, “the second year”, he wrote, “sees him a changed man”: “in short, though sometimes breaking loose, he is now a very respectable character, and increased in favour with everybody . . . The third year sees him still further altered from what he was”. “To almost every one”, he concluded, the period spent at college “brings important changes and on us the effect was marvellous.”101 This was precisely the gradual, yet certain, progres- sion from boyhood to manhood which formed the centre of the Noetic ideal. In addition, White contradicted the claim that relations between junior and senior members had never been more strained. In recent years, he claimed to have noticed an important change, with “several Dons of Colleges” displaying a much friendlier attitude towards undergraduates and showing an interest in their opinions.102 Although we cannot know whether this perceived change was related to the attempts of the Noetics

96 Townsend, The Paean of Oxford, p. 9. 97 Ibid., 48. 98 Ibid., 54–5. 99 Ibid., 23. 100 Ibid., 61, 118. 101 [ J. White], “Three Years at Oxford”, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 24:147 (Decem- ber 1828), 867. 102 Ibid., 862. 160 chapter four to engage more directly with undergraduates in the years following the Statute of 1825, the fact that junior members were, for the first time, writing publicly in support of their position, may fairly be taken as a mark of their growing impact. To this may be added the fact that, although it would prove only a temporary arrangement, the Noetics were also successful in winning over one of the most prominent of the student journalists of the 1810s, John Henry Newman.103 As Newman recalled later in his autobiography, it had been precisely the openness and respect shown him by Whately, in particular, that had attracted him to the Noetics. After Newman had been elected fellow of Oriel at the tender age of 21, Whately “acted the part of a gentle and encouraging instructor ”. “He, emphatically, opened my mind, and taught me to think and to use my reason”, Newman recalled.104 Despite the departure of Copleston in January 1828, the Noetics were at their strongest when they dominated the Committee appointed by the Hebdomadal Board on 23 March 1829 to propose recommendations for a new examination statute. Despite the presence of a number of members hostile to reform (most notably, Ashurst Turner Gilbert, the President of Brasenose and a future supporter of the Oxford Movement), Whately and Hawkins succeeded in stamping the Committee’s proposals with a distinctly Noetic character.105 In many ways, the Committee itself was a product of Noetic calls for much greater consultation with Convocation in the framing of new examination statutes dating back to the campaign of resistance to the proposed statute of 1824. Indeed, they were granted “a discretionary power to consult with, and to receive communications from,

103 Newman first came into contact with the Noetics in 1822, when he was elected fellow of Oriel. His period of deepest involvement though was between 1825 and 1829 when he served as Vice-Principal and Tutor at St. Alban Hall under Whately and, from 1826, as tutor at Oriel. In 1829 Newman finally parted ways with the school, in particular, with Whately, ostensibly over the question of Peel’s re-election. However, as Newman makes clear in his autobiography, the deeper cause was a gradual move away from the liberalism of his younger days following his realization that he had been “beginning to prefer intellectual excellence to moral.” For more details, see J.H. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), ed. I. Ker (London, 2004), pp. 114–8. 104 Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, p. 114. 105 Ward, Victorian Oxford, p. 58; P. Corsi, Science and Religion: Baden Powell and the Anglican Debate 1800–1860 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 112. They were probably aided in this by support from the Whig Warden of New College, Philip Nicholas Shuttleworth, who was later to be one of the few heads to support the abandonment of subscription to the Thirty- Nine Articles. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 161 other members of Convocation”.106 There followed an extensive consultation process with many senior members offering their views to the Committee. Where the papers have been signed, we can see that several leading Noetics took part including Hampden, Arnold and Baden Powell. Many others, however, which did not give their authors’ names, expressed similar views. A central concern of nearly all the suggestions was the need to reassert the authority of senior members. Many agreed with Copleston and Whately that the best way to achieve this was by raising the reputation of Oxford’s traditional syllabus and encouraging tutors to specialize. Whately’s call for logic to be removed as a compulsory subject for the ordinary degree, but to be made indispensable for honours received support.107 Other writers took a wider view, one suggesting, for instance, that Literae Humaniores be split into separate schools, to allow a greater focus on ancient history and philosophy, an idea popular not only with Noetics like Arnold and Hampden,108 but also with junior members.109 At the same time, such a move, he argued, would encourage tutors to specialize in particular areas of the traditional syllabus, thus raising not only the standard of their teaching, but also their reputation with their pupils.110 Another writer suggested that examiners too could benefit in this way from specialization.111 Also popular was the idea that the examination itself should be made more challenging, not only by raising the standard expected in the various departments of knowledge, but also by making a candidate’s result depend entirely on his performance in the schools, rather than on the list of books he chose to submit.112 As a result, the examiner would be invested with greater power and standing; this move had, moreover, been mooted as a suggestion in the opposition to the proposed statute of 1824.113 Others argued for additional boosts to the powers of examiners, for example, that they, rather than the candidates, ought to decide the list of books required for first-class honours, and that, for the lower classes, they should have the

106 Oxford University Archives. MS. Minutes of the Hebdomadal Board Meeting 1823–33 folio 101. 107 “Examination Statute—Suggestions”, Bodl. MS. Top. Oxon. d. 15. p. 52. 108 See a letter from Hampden dated 21 May 1830 included in “Examination Statute— Suggestions”, p. 62. 109 Ibid., 4. 110 Ibid., 4. 111 Ibid., 6–7. 112 Ibid., 4. 113 See above, p. 149. 162 chapter four right to add others of their own choice.114 Another measure which was discussed by the Committee was the possible introduction of wholly written examinations for the first time, following the successful introduction of printed questions in 1828.115 It is certainly possible to interpret a desire to move away from the unpredictable and frequently combative oral examinations as a measure designed to disempower candidates and increase the control of examiners. As Christopher Stray has pointed out, written examinations were already the norm at Cambridge where “the picture of organized speed and silence in the examination hall presented a striking contrast with the public verbal battles taking place in Oxford”.116 There were other suggestions which proposed more radical changes in order to increase levels of student respect, breaking away from the traditional classical syllabus and introducing modern subjects. One writer was keen to substitute an English book in moral philosophy for one of the Greek and Latin books in the examination for an ordinary degree. The books he offered as possible alternatives—Dougald Stewart’s Philosophy of the Mind or part of Joseph Butler’s Analogy—suggest a strong Noetic influence.117 Copleston was responsible for introducing Stewart’s philosophy to Oxford and for popularizing his work among leading Noetics like Whately and Senior.118 The most likely author, though, would seem to be Hampden, whom the Oxford Commissioners were later to credit with the inclusion of Butler in the examination syllabus.119 Although this writer advocated the inclusion of modern subjects, he shared the conservative aims of Copleston and Whately. He desired only to raise the standard and reputation of the examination for ordinary degrees. At present, he claimed, it “demands little more than the exercise of the memory to the neglect of the cultivation of the higher powers of the mind”.120 It should,

114 “Examination Statute—Suggestions”, p. 52. 115 M.C. Curthoys, “The Examination System” in Brock and Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. VI, p. 347; Stray, “The Shift from Oral to Written Examina- tion”, 43. 116 Stray, “The Shift from Oral to Written Examination”, 39. 117 “Examination Statute—Suggestions”, p. 28. 118 Brent, “Copleston, Edward (1776–1849)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Here Brent says that Copleston introduced the philosophy of Dugald Stewart to Oxford and to his wider circle of Noetic friends, in particular, Whately and Nassau Senior. 119 Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State, Discipline, Studies and Revenues of the University and Colleges of Oxford: Together with the Evidence and an Appendix (Oxford, 1852), p. 63. 120 “Examination Statute—Suggestions”, p. 27. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 163 he stressed, exercise “the intellectual faculties in general . . . but especially . . . the . . . judgment and reasoning”.121 Others suggested bringing in works of modern history and philosophy;122 Thomas Arnold even advocated the inclusion of civil law in a reconstructed Greats School.123 Per- haps most radical, however, were Baden Powell’s demands on behalf of the Mathematical examiners.124 As well as desiring a greater interval (not less than one term) between the classical and mathematical examinations, he also asked that candidates’ names be published in accordance with their individual merit rather than in classes with an invariable standard.125 Over the several months it took the Committee to collect the suggestions of Convocation and to compose its report some senior members decided to publish their views independently. Here too, support for the idea of improving the standard and raising the reputation of traditional subjects found much favour. Whately himself took the lead in this by reprinting an extended extract from the preface to his Elements of Logic.126 J.T. Round, a tutor of Balliol and recent examiner, published his own pamphlet in support of Whately’s position that logic would be raised in the estimation of junior members if it were made compulsory for honours, but questioned the wisdom of making it optional for everyone else.127 Others praised what they saw as the more constructive attitude which the Noetics appeared to be adopting towards junior members. One writer, styling himself “Philodi- caeus,” applauded the spirit of conservative reform promoted by Whately and Hawkins. At last, he wrote, Oxford had realized that its reputation was to be safeguarded “not by despising other seminaries . . . not by cau- tiously abstaining from all change, through a puerile dread of innovation, but by excelling these seminaries in the wisdom and purity of their institutions, and by introducing from time to time, such improvements . . . as reason suggests, and the state of society demands”.128 He had a particular admiration for Whately and saw him as key to the establishment of a new and respectful relationship between junior and senior members. Desirous

121 “Examination Statute—Suggestions”, p. 24. 122 Ibid., 58. 123 MS. Oriel College Letters no. 567; Ward, Victorian Oxford, p. 58. 124 “Examination Statute—Suggestions”, p. 26. 125 Ibid., 37–9. 126 R. Whately, Extract from the Preface to Elements of Logic (Oxford, 1829). 127 J.T. Round, A Few Remarks Suggested by the Reprinting of part of the Preface to Dr. Whately’s Elements of Logic (Oxford, 1829), pp. 3–4, 14. 128 ‘Philodicaeus’, A Brief Appeal to the Good Sense of the University of Oxford on Clas- sification on Merit: with Some Hints to H.A. Woodgate on Logic (Oxford, 1829), p. 2. 164 chapter four of seeing candidates’ names listed in order of individual merit rather than class lists, he urged undergraduates who supported the idea to petition the heads of houses through Whately “who is understood to be, on all occasions, the champion of rational improvement”.129 When the Committee’s report was finally submitted to the Hebdomadal Board on 9 December 1829, it amounted to a pretty confident statement of Noetic principles. As W.R. Ward has pointed out, it “bore the mark of the powerful mind of Richard Whately, and of his old Oriel friends such as R.D. Hampden”.130 Thus, we see support given to a policy of conservative change, rather than of radical reform. Indeed, the Committee stressed their wish to avoid any “essential departure from the established state of things”.131 When, therefore, we observe the recommendations regarding the examinations for ordinary degrees and honours, the emphasis was very much on raising the standard and broadening the range of traditional classical studies. Whately’s suggestion that logic should be made optional for those seeking merely an ordinary degree was adopted; however, candidates were not allowed to offer modern books in place of it. Instead, they were to have a choice between “Ancient Greek or Roman History, or . . . any Ancient Philosophical Treatise”.132 To give encouragement to mathematics at this level, candidates would also be allowed to offer the first four books of Euclid. For honours candidates, a similar policy was adopted. “Ancient History, Politics and Poetics” were to be added to the catalogue as separate topics on which examiners might ask questions and logic was to be made compulsory for attaining honours.133 In addition, examiners would be given the right to add to the books selected by candidates, meaning that unseen passages could be set for translation for the first time. Significantly, though, the Committee was not entirely hostile towards the more radical changes demanded by junior members and some leading

129 ‘Philodicaeus’, A Brief Appeal to the Good Sense of the University of Oxford on Clas- sification on Merit, p. 7. Also Thomas Vowler Short republished his Letter to the Dean of Christ Church (originally from 1822) in which he suggested one of the best ways to restore senior authority was to consult a much wider range of senior members including tutors when framing a new examination statute and to take junior opinions on board to a limited extent. See T.V. Short, A Letter to the Very Rev. Dean of Christ Church on the state of public examination in the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1829), pp. 7, 25. 130 Ward, Victorian Oxford, p. 58. 131 To the Board of Heads of Houses and Proctors. The Report of the Committee Appointed by a Resolution Dated March 23 1829 to Discuss the Construction of a New Examination Stat- ute, printed copy, Bodl. G.A. Oxon. b. 21, p. 2. 132 Ibid., 4. 133 Ibid., 3–4. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 165

Noetics. Indeed, at the beginning of the report, they were keen to give the impression that they were interested in improving conditions not only for tutors and senior members, but for students as well. Thus, while the need to reduce the burden on examiners was once more a central concern, it was presented as a “serious evil” not only for “all Tutors,” but also for “the general studies of the young men”.134 Most importantly, references to modern authors were, for the first time, to be allowed in the examination; this move, was however, framed in decidedly conservative terms and was to be very much under the control of senior members. “A reference to modern writers”, was to be sanctioned only “in such cases as the Masters see fit” while “strictly retaining the treatises of the Ancients as the basis of the Examination.”135 Likewise, support for Baden Powell’s goal of separating mathematical honours entirely from the classical was given only limited support. While all students were to be encouraged to pursue mathematics at a higher level and the mathematical examiners were, for the first time, to be paid as much as their classical counterparts, no change would be made in the interval between the two examinations, and, even more crucially, no candidate would be able to compete for mathematical honours before they had received a classical testamur.136 Likewise, there would be no dramatic change in the classification of candidates: alphabetical listing in classes was to remain in force throughout.137 Although the need to raise the profile of Oxford’s syllabus and examination system informed every proposal which the report put forward, the most significant suggestion for achieving this end—a university entrance examination—was given its own platform in a separate appendix. Here, the Committee bemoaned the “generally defective state of preparation of the young men” on their entrance into Oxford. “The proper task of the Schoolmaster is thus devolved on the College Tutor”, they complained, “whose time and spirits are exhausted, and the leisure, which should have been devoted to his own improvement, usurped by the drudgery thus improperly imposed upon him.”138 The low standard of teaching to which the tutor was thus reduced and the correspondingly low achievement of students were, they felt, the principal reasons why respect for tutors had

134 The Report of the Committee, p. 1. 135 Ibid., 4. 136 Ibid., 3–5, 7. 137 Ibid., 7. 138 Appendix to The Report of the Committee Appointed by a Resolution Dated March 23 1829 to Discuss the Construction of a New Examination Statute, p. 1. 166 chapter four fallen so dramatically in recent years.139 From their private correspondence, we can see that Whately and Hawkins were chiefly responsible for this plan.140 Whately, in particular, wrote to a number of friends about his hopes for the measure. “Unless we secure men’s coming here toler- ably grounded in elementary knowledge”, he wrote in one such letter, “we must ever remain, as is too much the case now, in great measure a school, and a bad school too.”141 “We can never possess the character of a Univer- sity till we adopt a plan for securing, in all who are admitted, a moderate foundation on which to build a course of manly study.”142

Back to School: The Failure of Noetic Reform and the Rise of Tractarianism

Pietro Corsi has astutely identified the years between 1825 and 1829 as “the peak of Noetic influence at Oxford”.143 Although the Committee’s report had been a confident statement of Noetic principle, based on extended consultation with senior members, the statute, when proposed to Con- vocation later in 1830, failed at its first attempt and was only passed in the November with significant modifications.144 What had gone wrong? In many ways, historians like W.R. Ward are right to see the Noetic proposals for reform as having fallen victim to the “political maelstrom” which began with the passing of Catholic Emancipation and the associated controversy surrounding Robert Peel’s re-election in 1829.145 As Colin Mat- thew has pointed out, there had been a long-standing connection between the Noetics and the question of Catholic Emancipation.146 Copleston had backed Lord Grenville’s calls to ease restrictions on England’s Catholics147 and it was Whately’s endorsement of Peel’s re-election on this issue which was to make him deeply unpopular with other heads of houses and senior

139 Appendix to The Report of the Committee, p. 2. 140 In a letter to Hawkins dated 5 August 1838 (A.P. Stanley, Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. Vol. I (New York, 1846), p. 323), Arnold credited him with the idea. According to Tuckwell (Pre-Tractarian Oxford, p. 66), it had been Copleston, however, who had originally proposed the idea. 141 E.J. Whately, Life and Correspondence of Richard Whately Vol. I (London, 1866), p. 79. 142 Ibid., 83–4. 143 Corsi, Science and Religion, p. 112. 144 Ward, Victorian Oxford, pp. 59–60; Corsi, Science and Religion, p. 114. 145 Ward, Victorian Oxford, p. 59. 146 Matthew, “Noetics, Tractarians, and the Reform of the University of Oxford”, 203. 147 Tuckwell, Pre-Tractarian Oxford, pp. 33, 38. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 167 members generally.148 Moreover, the question of Catholic Emancipation was seen by many who opposed it as part of a much larger and more dangerous ‘liberal’ conspiracy against England’s traditional constitution and establishment; and, particularly following the 1830 Revolution in France, the Noetics came increasingly to be associated, albeit unfairly, with the threatening spectre of secular radicalism and continental revolution. While this fact is now recognized by most historians studying the religious upheaval of the 1830s, a particularly important aspect of the campaign against the Noetics has largely been ignored, namely that which accused them of advocating changes in the university which would at best encourage students to challenge the authority of their seniors and, at worst, promote a full-scale uprising at Oxford with the aim of overthrow- ing the established order. One pamphlet, which Baden Powell attributed to John Dean, the Principal of St Mary Hall, likened the Noetics to the Irish revolutionary leader, Daniel O’Connell. By refusing to accept Con- vocation’s rejection of their proposals, he wrote, “they pride themselves on marching with the march of mind and spirit of the age; and . . . think, with the great Agitator [O’Connell], that importunity must at last prevail, and extort from our weariness what our judgment would refuse”.149 Another pamphlet published in 1830 stressed the need for a re-emphasis of “moral discipline” and “the Christian virtue of humility”.150 Examina- tions, the author declared, should not be designed to encourage feelings of self-importance; rather they should act as mechanisms of control to ensure the authority of senior members. “A harsh and austere mode of conducting [them] . . . is desirable”, he wrote, “as it secures the more respect, and increases that feeling of awe and trembling, with which every dutiful undergraduate should be instructed to approach the majesty of Alma Mater.”151 His view of the proper function of a university was clear: We seek not to produce men who shall guide the state by . . . the vain theories of philosophy; legislators whose minds shall be corrupted . . . by the study of systems of public rights; . . . Churchmen of miscalled liberal views and habits of studious trifling . . . Our design, the ultimate end of our institutions and labours . . . is . . . to keep up a succession of . . . orthodox Protestants in Church and State; . . . men who despise the frivolous refinements of the

148 Tuckwell, Pre-Tractarian Oxford, p. 69. 149 [ J. Dean(e)], Agitate! Agitate! Agitate! (1830). 150 An Address to the Members of the Lower Division of the House of Convocation on the Proposed Examination Statute (Oxford, 1830), p. 4. 151 Ibid., 10. 168 chapter four

age, and are determined to put a stop to all the dangerous innovations of the boasted march of intellect.152 Unsurprisingly, future members of the Oxford Movement were prominent among the members of this growing opposition. In a pamphlet, also published in 1830, R.I. Wilberforce condemned the desire of Baden Powell and the other Mathematical examiners to separate the mathematical examination further from that of classics. Such a move, he argued, would only give greater prominence to a subject particularly responsible for encouraging an undue sense of pride in students. Mathematics, he wrote, should be pursued at the university as an “instrument of education”, not a speculative enquiry. That his meaning was not lost on those Noetics he particularly targeted in his pamphlet is clear from the accompanying doodle of a birch broom designed to chastise schoolboys with which Baden Powell decorated his own personal copy.153 That historians have not commented on this aspect of the campaign against the Noetics in 1830 is significant, for it is typical of an important tendency to underestimate the importance of long-standing debates within the university in shaping the controversies of the 1830s. Most studies tend to assume that before the events of 1828–32, Oxford had not felt any real pressure for liberal reform which had been a prominent topic of parliamentary debate for several decades. The only response it was capable of when external events were such (as in the case of the French Revolution) as could not be ignored, was an innate and reactionary conservatism. In the words of Colin Matthew, Oxford’s only response to the crisis of 1789 was, “a greater emphasis on Anglican confessionalism, indeed a revival of it.” The idea that it might reform in order to survive was entirely alien. Thus, when the next external crisis came about (the events of 1828–32), Oxford was largely an institution out of time. “Though”, on a national level, Matthew wrote, the “theoretical disabilities” of the “old constitution” had “in some measure” been “alleviated, particularly in the case of non- establishment protestants . . . this was not so with . . . Oxford University. There . . . the remnants of the establishmentarian constitution defined the character of the university in a way that . . . they had in considerable measure largely ceased to do in wider English civil society.” On this view, then, both the Noetics’ attitude of “prudential liberal conservatism” and the

152 An Address to the Members of the Lower Division of the House of Convocation, p. 15. 153 [R.I. Wilberforce], Considerations Respecting the Most Effectual Means of Encourag- ing Mathematics in Oxford (Oxford, 1830), pp. 7–8. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 169

Tractarians’ anti-liberal campaign are best understood as ‘responses’ to a set of external events to which the University could not help but react.154 What this kind of argument neglects, however, is the vigorous internal debate about the need for reform which had been a dominant feature of life at Oxford since the outbreak of the American and French Revolu- tions. Along with the conservative writers whose views ultimately shaped the content of the 1800 Statute, a number of commentators, most notably Edward Tatham, had advocated the introduction of modern reforms.155 The statute itself, although enacted with the primary aim of strengthening senior authority, nonetheless introduced significant innovations in the form of a uniform curriculum and competitive examination.156 More- over, within two decades of the 1800 Statute, real pressure began to build among junior members for further changes to both the curriculum and examination system.157 The fear of radical reform embodied, most of all, for Oxford, in the spectre of junior rebellion, was not simply awoken with the events of 1828–32. Catholic Emancipation and a second revolution in France found a university already alive to the issues at hand; the fears of generational conflict which were to give impetus to the Oxford Movement were exactly the same as those which had promoted the rise of the Noet- ics six years earlier. It may now be a commonplace to assert the similarities between the Noetic and Tractarian ideals of university education, to say that both privileged the traditional classical curriculum and tutorial system; what remains, by contrast, unacknowledged, is the fact that both groups gained popularity within the university primarily because of their perceived ability to safeguard the authority of senior members in the face of ongoing fears of junior rebellion. The irony, of course, was to be that, in the case of the Tractarians, within a few short years, they would themselves come to be seen as a radical youth movement endangering the traditional role of the university. This claim to be able to succeed where the Noetics had failed was key to the early coherence of Tractarianism and formed one of the central issues around which the growing competition between the two movements developed. Just as Copleston and Whately had made much of the idea of turning Oxford into a proper university for the education of independent- minded young men, Newman and his associates argued conversely for the

154 Matthew, “Noetics, Tractarians and the Reform of the University of Oxford”, 197. 155 See above, pp. 67–8. 156 See above, pp. 64–5. 157 See above, pp. 115–138. 170 chapter four need to model Oxford more along the lines of a successful public school, with a school-boy curriculum and syllabus, designed not to stunt mental development, as their opponents were later to claim, but to facilitate the cultivation of the ideal moral character of a Christian: childlike obedience to established authority. This was all part of the privileging of moral character over intellect which began with the initial reaction against the Noetics in 1830, long before the Tractarian movement itself was formed. Such a strong emphasis on obedience and respect for authority struck exactly the right note with senior members anxious about the potential for junior rebellion. Buying into the image already established by the pamphlets of 1830, Newman and his associates fostered the notion that Copleston and the other Noetics had promoted an unwarranted self-sufficiency among students through their privileging of intellectual development over moral character.158 Long before what is often considered the official beginning of the Tractarian Movement (with John Keble’s Assize Sermon of 14 July 1833), Newman and two other tutors at Oriel who were themselves to become leading Tractarians, R.I. Wilberforce and Hurrell Froude, were attempting to remodel the system of tutorial instruction so that it would centre on moral rather than intellectual training.159 James Eli Adams has made the astute observation that their ideal of the tutorial relationship “preserved something of the highly charged emotional atmosphere of public school life”, an atmosphere based, above all, on “intense and personal” feelings. It was precisely this personal element, Adams claimed, which Newman and his friends sought to ‘systematize’ in their attempts to reform undergraduate instruction at Oriel.160 Thomas Mozley, writing many years afterwards, described their intentions as “tuition revolutionised”; they aimed, he wrote, at “an exacter regard to the character and special gifts of each undergraduate, and a closer relationship between him and his tutor” in which the tutor would stand “in the place of a father, or an elder and affectionate brother”.161 As Tractarian supporter, William Sewell, explained in 1834, “In one word, we would stand to the young—first as their moral

158 Nockles, “An Academic Counter-Revolution”, 155. 159 Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, p. 35. Writing years later in his autobiography, New- man remarked that it was possible in the coming together of the three tutors at Oriel “to discern the first elements of that movement afterwards called Tractarian.” 160 J.E. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (London, 1995), p. 78. 161 T. Mozley, Reminiscences Chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement (London, 1882), pp. 229, 181. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 171 guardians, and then as their instructors in learning . . . [S]uch is the foundation of our system”.162 Later liberal reformers, like Herman Merivale, realized that a significant part of the appeal of the Tractarians had been their perceived ability to help restore harmonious relations between junior and senior junior members. “When first the theological ‘movement’ began”, he wrote, in 1843, there was excited . . . a strong feeling of dissatisfaction with the existing studies and occupations of the place . . . The presumptuous turn of mind, the reliance on intellectual ability, supposed to result from instruction addressing itself to the intellect alone, were to be corrected by a strong diversion in favour of a more subjective course of study. The study was to be the formation of moral character by habit, not the imparting of what is commonly called learning . . . Catholic theology, and Moral Philosophy in accordance with Catholic doctrine, were to be the main foundations of the improved education of these newer days; science and literature were not, indeed, to be neglected, but to be cultivated as in subordination only to these ‘archi- tectonic’ sciences. The cultivation of “piety and obedience” was to be put before the amass- ing of “objective knowledge”, concluded Merivale.163 Certainly, in his collaboration with Froude and Wilberforce at Oriel, and afterwards, in the early days of the Tractarian Movement, Newman did not seek to do away with the traditional classical syllabus, but to utilize it for the more important task of religious instruction. Thus, in contrast to the Noetics, we see Newman emphasizing the study of less controversial classical subjects. Thomas Mozley tells us that as a tutor at Oriel he was particularly keen on promoting “poetry and scholarship” (grammar), precisely those subjects which formed the staples of a public school education.164 Rather than focusing on those aspects of the classical curriculum which, it was felt, brought undergraduates into greater contact with the issues of modern life, such as ancient history and moral philosophy, as the Noetics had done, Newman preferred to use classics as a means of distancing his students from the corrupting influences of the world. On describing the hordes of journalists pouring into Oxford to report on Peel’s re-election campaign in 1829, Newman revelled in the fact that these evil representa- tives of “banausic republicanism” and modernity appeared insignificant

162 Cited in [ J. Wilson], “Admission of Dissenters to Degrees in the English Universi- ties”, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 35:221 (May 1834), 723. 163 [H. Merivale], “The Late Dr. Arnold”, Edinburgh Review 76:154 ( January 1843), 375. 164 Mozley, Reminiscences, p. 225. 172 chapter four

“amid the buildings of old Oxford”. “They understood us”, he wrote, “about as much as they would Sophocles and Pindar.”165 Hardly less important for Newman in communicating his ideal of university life to undergraduates was the opportunity of regularly addressing them he enjoyed in his capacity of Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. Increasingly, students also came to hear him preach his parish sermons in the village of Littlemore, just outside Oxford.166 In the early 1830s, he frequently used both these platforms to promote his favourite notion that independence and self-assertion were not the qualities which should characterize the mature Christian, but reverence and obedience as in a young child. In one university sermon, given on 13 April 1830, Newman told the assembled congregation of students that as they approached physical manhood, they must become, in their moral characters, “like little children in simplicity and humility”.167 In another sermon, on the subject of wilfulness, he cautioned them against the “innate rebellious principle” in young men “which disobeys as if for the sake of disobedience”. Rather, he told them, they must learn to “submit as little children”.168 His message is perhaps clearest in a parish sermon of 28 December 1833 on “The Mind of Little Children”. Here, he declared that the simplicity of a child’s ways and notions, his ready belief of everything he is told, his artless love, his frank confidence, his confession of helplessness, his ignorance of evil, his inability to conceal his thoughts, his contentment, his prompt forgetfulness of trouble, his admiring without coveting; and, above all, his reverential spirit . . . mark [him] as the fit emblem of the matured Christian, when weaned from things temporal, and living in the intimate conviction of the Divine Presence.169 Newman and his associates were aided in their criticism of the Noetics partly by the behaviour of some of the group themselves and also by the praise they received in periodical articles and other publications critical of Oxford. On the one hand, Baden Powell, in particular, adopted a much more radical position in the years following the passing of the 1830 Stat- ute, eventually resigning from the office of mathematical examiner in 1832

165 J.H. Newman to J. Newman, (17 March 1829), Letters and Diaries of J.H. Newman Vol. II, T. Gornall and I. Ker (eds.) (Oxford, 1979), 132. 166 A.T. Gilbert to Wellington (26 December 1839), cited in Nockles, “An Academic Counter-Revolution,” 142, n. 19. 167 J.H. Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford Between A.D. 1826 and 1843 (London, 1909), p. 45. 168 Ibid., 170, 172. 169 J.H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons Vol. II (London, 1908), pp. 64–5. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 173 when the heads of houses failed to take any of his new recommendations on board. After this he took to giving polemical lectures and publishing independent criticisms of the state of science and mathematics at Oxford and endorsing the comments of other external critics about the small encouragement given to science there.170 In addition, the Noetics were made more unpopular because their charge that Oxford too much resembled a school, rather than a university,171 was echoed by some of the most hostile external critics of Oxford like William Hamilton, himself a former double first-class man. In two articles in The Edinburgh Review in 1831, he argued that the dominant position of the collegiate system with its tutorial discipline was an illegal usurpation of the functions of the university proper and its official instructors, the professors. Tutors were originally designed to be nothing more than school-masters, he argued, and their enforced dominance by the heads of houses, had, more than anything else, killed off instruction in the higher degrees and reduced the standard of teaching to that of a bad school.172 Worse still, other writers who supported Hamilton’s criticisms and likened Oxford’s education system to that of a failing school, openly praised the characters and views of leading Noetics including Thomas Arnold and Whately.173 One anonymous pamphlet, for example, recommended some recently published comments by Thomas Arnold alongside Hamilton’s articles and finished by praising him as the leading champion of “modern knowledge”, first among all of Eng- land’s headmasters in “emancipating” his school “from the shackles of the old Classical System”.174 In addition, Newman and his friends received the support of a number of writers who came forward to defend Oxford against these attacks; a significant number of these were to be future allies of the Oxford Move- ment and, even at this early stage, were sympathetic to their pastoral ideal of tutorial instruction. Thomas Vaughan, for example, published a

170 Corsi, Science and Religion, pp. 115–6. 171 For Whately’s comments, see above, p. 166 and for Arnold’s, p. 153. 172 [W. Hamilton], “Universities of England—Oxford”, Edinburgh Review 53:106 ( June 1831), 384–427; [W. Hamilton], “Review of The Legality of the Present Academical System Asserted Against the New Calumnies of the Edinburgh Review”, Edinburgh Review 54:108 (December 1831), 478–504. 173 Oxford Academical Abuses Disclosed by some of the Initiated (London, 1832), p. 28. At p. 20, this writer also praises the work of Barthold Georg Niebuhr, whom Arnold translated from the German and introduced to England. 174 Considerations on the Great and Various Injuries arising from the Course of Education pursued in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and in nearly all the Public Schools of this Kingdom (London, 1832), pp. 4, 23, 36. 174 chapter four

full-length answer to Hamilton’s charges. Although it is unclear how well he knew Newman at this point, his description of Oxford’s tutorial system seems to betray more than a passing familiarity with the system he had recently tried to introduce at Oriel. At Oxford, wrote Vaughan, students, were “most carefully and conscientiously brought up to virtue, religion and learning” as part of “Collegiate families” in which everyone named “his tutor a teacher of morality as well as literature”.175 He then contrasted this ideal state of affairs with the “barbarous factions, the furious disputes, the unbridled rage” of the pre-collegiate Oxford idealized by Hamilton in his two articles.176 In a second article on the same theme, he attributed Hamilton’s seeming love of chaos to the influence of radical German philosophy;177 given the increasing tendency to align the views of leading Noetics with those of Hamilton, this attribution can only have caused further damage to the group’s reputation, when we consider the notorious Germanophilia of Arnold in particular. Yet, it was, above all, the support given by leading Noetics to the calls of external critics for an end to compulsory subscription to the Thirty- Nine Articles at matriculation which did most to convince Oxford’s senior members that they were now firmly allied with the forces of secularism and radical reform. Although the crisis over subscription did not erupt until the Spring of 1834, when a Unitarian MP, G.W. Wood, supported by the radical Earl of Radnor in the Lords, introduced a bill into the House of Commons to allow Dissenters admission into the English Universities, the issue had been contentious since the late eighteenth century and had become increasingly so in the years after 1830. Their opposition to subscription only increased the suspicion of senior members that the Noetics, as a group, supported radical reform and the transfer of greater authority to the juniors; for there was emerging a clear connection in the public mind between those who opposed subscription and those who urged junior members to seize control of the reform process. One pamphlet, published by a recent Oxford graduate in 1833, combined his opposition to subscription with a call to his “brother students” to rise up and impose

175 [T. Vaughan], The Legality of the Present Academical System of the University of Oxford Asserted Against the New Calumnies of the Edinburgh Review (Oxford, 1831), p. 115. 176 Ibid., 114. 177 [T. Vaughan], The Legality of the Present Academical System of the University of Oxford Re-asserted Against the New Calumnies of the Edinburgh Review (Oxford, 1832), pp. 22–3. He described Hamilton as “some renegado . . . just fresh from the classroom of a Dr. Britschneider, or a Dr. Wagschneider, or some other Teutonic Gamaliel, with a name as unutterable as his blasphemies.” noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 175 their views on senior members. “We are anxious”, he wrote, “to call the attention of the Bachelors and younger Masters of Oxford to many points which appear to us great blemishes in our system”; and without delay, he urged them to “come forward and with . . . firmness insist upon reform.” With the failure of the 1830 Statute to bring real change, it was now clear, he wrote, that any “attempt to persuade [the heads of houses and the elder resident Masters] willingly to make . . . alterations in the systems of the University would be entirely ineffectual”.178 Oxford may have presented a united front against the possibility of parliamentary interference, with even leading liberals like Philip Nicholas Shuttleworth, Warden of New College, and Hampden signing a declaration against Wood’s bill;179 however, once the initial threat had receded, the cracks began to show. As early as November 1833, Shuttleworth had proposed altering the existing form of subscription, but this had been rejected by the other heads.180 However, with the publication of Hamp- den’s Observations on Religious Dissent in August 1834, which openly advocated the admission of dissenters and the abolition of all religious tests, Newman considered that “hostilities in the University” had now begun.181 At the centre of Hampden’s opposition to subscription was a view of the purpose of university education with which Newman and the Tractarians could never concur. He completely disagreed with the Tractarian view that requiring matriculants to subscribe the Thirty-Nine articles was equivalent to expecting children to learn the Catechism. “The former”, he declared, “is addressed to a voluntary agent, competent to act for himself, the latter to one not come to the full exercise of his will, and for whom therefore the parent has to act.”182 For Hampden, undergraduates were not children, but young men who ought to be treated as such; and education concerned the maturing of the reasoning faculty not inculcating mere obedience to authority. “Tests at admission to the University are exclusions”, he stated,

178 Thoughts on Reform at Oxford by a Graduate (Oxford, 1833), pp. 3–6. 179 P.B. Nockles, “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”: The Oxford Movement and the University in Brock and Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. VI, p. 215. It would be untrue to say that there was no Noetic opposition at this point. As Nockles points out, Baden Powell wrote a pamphlet called Reasons for not Joining the Dec- laration and Thomas Arnold and Bonamy Price were rumoured to have produced and circulated a counter-declaration from Rugby. 180 Ibid., 215. 181 J.H. Newman to R.D. Hampden (28 November 1834), Letters and Diaries of J.H. New- man Vol. IV, Gornall and Ker (eds.) (Oxford, 1980), p. 371. Cited in Nockles, “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”, p. 215. 182 R.D. Hampden, Postscript to Observations on Religious Dissent (London, 1835), p. 7. 176 chapter four

“and nothing more. They form no element of education.”183 The position of Newman and the leading Tractarians was clear: subscription was designed to “impress upon the minds of young men the teachable and subdued temper expected of them”. “They are not to reason”, Newman declared, “but to obey.”184 Hampden sought directly to refute this idea in his pamphlet. “Some contend”, he wrote, “that it is desirable to maintain subscription . . . on the ground of Authority, as enforcing a Christian principle . . . that of submission to the Church, as our nursing mother in the faith.” While all men, he wrote, should show “a reasonable deference to the authority of the Church”, as the individual matures, so his own reason should begin to take over the process of decision-making. Authority, declared Hampden, “is the natural support provided for the infancy . . . of individual judgement”.185 Hampden’s position was not helped by the strong similarities which his comments bore to the views expressed in an article by Hamilton which appeared in the Edinburgh Review a few months later. Like Hampden, Hamilton argued for the removal of all religious tests and stressed the importance of what he called the “Protestant privilege of free and unprejudiced enquiry”.186 Unfortunately, he was referring to what the Tractarians and many other senior members condemned as the “licentious speculation” of German university students,187 and, unlike Hampden, argued for the abolition of all compulsory religious instruction in higher education.188 Unsurprisingly, in the initial Tractarian reaction to Hampden’s pamphlet, the Noetics as a group were linked once again with the chaotic discipline and rebellious youth believed to characterize German universities, with Arnold’s favourite ancient historian Niebuhr coming in for particular censure.189 Writing towards the end of 1834, William Sewell, afterwards a moderate Tractarian, contrasted the unqualified assent which young Roman Catholics gave to the authority of the church with the wilfulness obvious in German students (and, he implied, at Oxford also). “No young

183 R.D. Hampden, Observations on Religious Dissent (Oxford, 1834), p. 36. 184 Newman to Perceval (11 January 1836), cited in H.P. Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey Vol. I (London, 1893), p. 301. 185 Hampden, Observations on Religious Dissent, pp. 37–8. 186 [W. Hamilton], “Admission of the Dissenters to the Universities”, Edinburgh Review 60:121 (October 1834), 228. 187 Ibid., 225. 188 Ibid., 220. 189 “The Cambridge Controversy: the Admission of Dissenters to Degrees”, Quarterly Review 52:104 (November 1834), 478–80. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 177 man in a Protestant Church can possibly pursue the study of theology”, he wrote, “without feeling in some degree . . . a tendency to an heretical spirit. He cannot meet difficulties without doubting, nor receive dogmas without distrust, nor have imperfect views of truth without preferring more intelligible errors.”190 As Nockles has pointed out, however, Trac- tarian suspicions that the Noetics were part of a “conspiracy to liberalize the University” were not unfounded. Whately, for one, admitted the truth of Hamilton’s claim that the collegiate system had illegally usurped the pre-existing framework of professorial instruction.191 Worse still, Hamp- den and Shuttleworth, together with the liberal proctor, Edmund Bayley, had been in secret communication with none other than Lord Holland, the original champion of Catholic Emancipation and reform, throughout the entire subscription controversy; he was kept fully up-to-date with developments and even asked how the government would like them to proceed.192 To coincide with the Earl of Radnor’s championing of Wood’s bill in the Lords on 6 March 1835, Hawkins and Hampden forced a proposal through the Hebdomadal Board that a declaration of conformity to the Church of England (as had been adopted in Cambridge) should be substituted for the existing form of subscription. To publicize this move, Hawkins published a letter to the Earl of Radnor in support of the declaration. In it he framed the move as the next step in the successful campaign of the Noetics to reform the university along modern lines and emphasized the central point made by Hampden that students must be treated as men and not schoolboys. Accordingly, he argued that if you insist that a man take an oath before he can gain membership of an institution, you must first properly inform him of the meaning of the oath and provide full instruction in its significance. Children may be expected to agree with propositions on the authority of their instructor; young men, however, must persuade their own reason. At present, Hawkins argued, Oxford matriculants had not had access to that kind of instruction and therefore to demand that they subscribe was

190 [W. Sewell], Thoughts on Subscription in a Letter to A Member of Convocation (Oxford, 1834), pp. 50–1; 56. 191 E.J. Whately, Life and Correspondence of Richard Whately Vol. I, p. 227: Writing around the time of the subscription crisis, he stated that the answer to the problem might be “to restore the Universities to their original condition; by doing away with the monopoly gradually acquired by the now-existing colleges and halls.” Individual MAs should once again have the right to set up their own halls just as “A master mason, shoemaker &c., &c., has a right as such to take apprentices.” 192 Nockles, “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”, p. 218. 178 chapter four wrong.193 He criticized the Tractarians for seeing this lack of preparedness as an advantage. “Some appear to think”, he wrote, “that the species of implicit assent which the student gives to the Thirty-Nine Articles when he subscribes them with little or no previous study . . . is in itself most useful and salutary, fostering humility and a teachable spirit, springing from, and increasing, a dutiful and affectionate attachment to the Church and her doctrines.” In most cases, he returned, the usual effect is “the reverse of salutary”, with greater chaos ensuing as students feel they have been tricked into subscribing something they do not fully understand.194 Sig- nificantly this was also a point made by Hamilton in one of his Edinburgh Review articles from a few months earlier.195 Hawkins’ Letter took the conflict over subscription to a new level. On 28 March, a list of nearly eighty resident members of Convocation was published who were opposed to the substitution of a declaration and stated their desire to counter the view (put forward by Hawkins)196 that “the wish to abolish subscription . . . at Matriculation, and to substitute some form of Declaration, is daily gaining ground in the University”.197 True to their word, when the motion was proposed to Convocation on 20 May, it was overwhelmingly rejected by 459 votes to 57. Of resident members who voted only 29 voted in favour with 110 against.198 There then followed something of a pamphlet war between Hawkins and leading Tractarian, E.B. Pusey, in which the by-now polarized positions of the two sides were clearly revealed. Pusey accused Hawkins and the other supporters of the declaration of over-estimating the maturity of students. Giving mere children the choice to make a “profession of assent”, he argued, to consider membership of the Church of England “an act of compliance rather than a duty,” would only further “encourage that wilfulness and carefulness”

193 [E. Hawkins], A Letter to the Earl of Radnor upon the Oaths, Dispensations, and Sub- scription to the Thirty-Nine Articles at the University of Oxford. By a Resident Member of Convocation (Oxford, 1835), p. 20. 194 Ibid., 20. 195 Hamilton, “Admission of Dissenters to the Universities”, 228: According to the logic of the Tractarians, he wrote, “we ought . . . to find in this country . . . that the dangerous neology so deprecated in German divines, should with us be found, if found at all, exclusively among those who had not formally surrendered their Protestant privilege of free and unprejudiced enquiry. But not only is this not the case, the very contrary is notoriously true; the attempt at fettering opinion, rousing apparently in the captive a perilous spirit of revolt.” 196 [Hawkins], A Letter to the Earl of Radnor, pp. 23, 26. 197 “Oxford, March 28 1835” (Printed Sheet) Bodl. Bliss B 210 (21). 198 Pamphlets in Defence of the Oxford Usage of Subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles at Matriculation (Oxford, 1835), 8. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 179 already such a regrettable feature of Oxford life.199 In his answers to Pusey’s questions, Hawkins contended even more forcefully for the importance of a student’s maturity and criticized the Tractarians’ “unexplained and indefinite reference to the authority of the Church.” “The precise limits of this deference, no one can determine”, he declared. “They must vary in different persons, at different ages, with different opportunities and capacities for enquiry.”200 Attacking the Tractarian insistence on the word ‘obedience’, he argued that when the average student was a young man and not a boy, it was impossible to conceal from him “that it is and ever must be at his own discretion to obey or disobey”.201 Although there were a couple of pamphlets published in favour of the Noetic position,202 the vast majority were supportive of the Tractarians. The breadth of their appeal on the point of subscription at least is clear from the fact that they received support from senior members, who, in later years, would become their staunch opponents including Geoffrey Faussett and F.D. Maurice.203 Although both men supported the Noetic idea that students ought to be treated as young men rather than school boys, the potential chaos which abolishing subscription and removing what they saw as a necessary sym- bol of senior authority might arouse, was a step too far. Despite the fact that the Tractarians were able to count on the support of many outside their immediate circle over the issue of subscription, there is much in P.B. Nockles’ claim that by 1834, Newman and the Trac- tarians owed their success primarily to the support they received from the younger part of the university: junior members and young MAs.204 The vast majority of pamphlets published in support of the Tractarian position

199 [E.B. Pusey], Questions respectfully addressed to the Members of Convocation on the Subjoined Declaration, which is proposed as a Substitute for the Subscription to the Thirty- Nine Articles at Matriculation (Oxford, 1835), p. 3. 200 [E. Hawkins], Oxford Matriculation Statutes. Answers to the Questions Addressed to the Members of Convocation by a Resident Member of Convocation (Oxford, 1835), p. 27. 201 Ibid., 11. 202 See, for example, [B.P. Symons], A Letter to a Non-Resident Friend upon Subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles at Matriculation, By a Senior Member of Convocation (Oxford, 1835). 203 [G. Faussett], A Few Plain Reasons for Retaining our Subscription to the Articles at Matriculation, in Preference to the Subjoined Declaration, which it is Proposed to Substi- tute (Oxford, 1835); [F.D. Maurice], Subscription No Bondage, or the Practical Advantages Afforded by the Thirty-Nine Articles as Guides in all the Branches of Academical Education (Oxford, 1835). 204 Nockles, “An Academic Counter-Revolution”, p. 142. 180 chapter four were written by men in their 20s and early 30s.205 Particularly worthy of mention is the Oxford University Magazine, a new venture by a group of undergraduates eager to spread Tractarian views on religion and education. As we learn from a letter of Roundell Palmer, then an undergraduate at Newman’s former college, Trinity, to his brother William, the group consisted mostly of his “personal friends” whom he was eager to join after he had taken his degree.206 The first (and only) number of the magazine included flattering reviews of John Keble’s The Christian Year 207 and Sewell’s pamphlet arguing against the admission of dissenters.208 As Colin Matthew has pointed out, “the view that undergraduates were . . . ‘not to reason, but to obey’ ” was one of the most popular tenets of Tractarianism in the 1830s;209 and its core of youthful supporters were at the forefront of spreading the message. The Oxford University Magazine, for example, stated confidently that a young man entering Oxford at this time would undoubtedly “acquire . . . a spirit of devoted loyalty; of warm attachment to the . . . ancient institutions of his country; a dislike and dread of rash innovation; and an admiration approaching to reverence for our orthodox and Apostolic Church”.210 Likewise, Charles Marriott, a BA Fellow of Oriel, praised the hard line which Pusey took against Hawkins and identified “submission to the Church” as the principle running through all the publications in favour of retaining subscription.211 Especial attention was paid to the distinction which Newman had set up in his sermons between the ideal mature Christian as an obedient child and the scurrilous “judges and critics” who were to be his opponents. Thus H.W. Wilberforce, at this time a young MA, laid weight on the fact that the existing mode of subscription was designed to keep students as “humble and teachable disciples” rather than to turn them into “sceptical disputants.”212 Crucially,

205 Of those writing directly in support of the Tractarian position on subscription: Charles Marriott was a 24-year-old BA and Fellow of Oriel; Charles Page Eden was a 28 year-old Fellow of Oriel; Henry William Wilberforce was a 28 year-old MA and graduate of Oriel; William Sewell was a 31-year-old Tutor and Fellow of Exeter College; Frederick Oakeley was a 33 year-old Fellow and Tutor of Balliol; even Newman and Pusey were only 34 and 35 years old respectively. 206 R. Palmer to W. Palmer (27 January 1834), cited in E. Heward, A Victorian Law Reformer: A Life of Lord Selborne (Chichester, 1997), p. 24. 207 The Oxford University Magazine (March 1 1834), 108–121. 208 Ibid., 104–7. 209 Matthew, “Noetics, Tractarians, and the Reform of the University of Oxford”, p. 211. 210 The Oxford University Magazine, 102–103. 211 [C. Marriott], Meaning of Subscription (Oxford, 1835), p. 2. 212 [H.W. Wilberforce], The Foundation of the Faith Assailed in Oxford: A Letter to His Grace The Archbishop of Canterbury (Oxford, 1835), p. 6. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 181 he was keen to link this division with the increasing polarization observ- able between the Tractarians and Noetics.213 Another pamphlet written by a young MA214 offered an almost word-perfect rendition of Newman’s 1833 sermon on “Little Children”. If the Noetics were successful in changing the existing form of subscription, he wrote, it would be tantamount to asserting that “the ‘kingdom of heaven’ . . . was to be received by those called to be its subjects in the posture of judges, and in the temper of critics, disputants, and doubters, in the posture . . . least of all resembling that of affectionate faith, in the temper most diametrically opposed to that of ‘little children’ ”.215 The relative youth of many of the Tractarians’ supporters did not go unnoticed at the time. When it was commented on, however, it was generally by their opponents. In his Letter to the Earl of Radnor, Hawk- ins remarked that Newman and Pusey’s staunchest and most vocal allies in the university were also those members with “the least experience”.216 For a movement which owed its success largely to its claim to be able to guarantee the authority of senior members, there was little to be gained by celebrating the fact that within two or three years, it had begun to take on the appearance of a generational uprising seeking to determine the policy of Convocation and the Hebdomadal Board. Indeed, it had been a central accusation of the Tractarians against the Noetics that they had been consistently attempting to seduce and corrupt the university’s junior members. H.W. Wilberforce, for one, had described the Noetics as a coherent and unified party consistently trying to “dazzle the minds of the younger students” with the “Neologian principles” of German biblical scholars.217 This was likewise the Tractarians’ central charge in the famous campaign against Hampden following his appointment as Regius Professor of Divinity in February 1836. After narrowly failing to convince the Hebdomadal Board to petition against his appointment, the infamous Corpus Committee, led by Newman and Pusey, succeeded in having a

213 [Wilberforce], Foundation of the Faith Assailed, pp. 10, 23–4. 214 A Religious Reason Against Substituting a Declaration of Conformity to the Church for the Subscription to the Articles Required at Matriculation in the University. Suggested to his Brother Members of Convocation, by a Non-resident Layman (Oxford, 1835), p. 3: Although this pamphlet is anonymous, the author hints at his relative youth and inexperience when he refers to the responsibility of being a Member of Convocation is “comparatively new” to him. 215 Ibid., 20. 216 [Hawkins], A Letter to the Earl of Radnor, p. 19. 217 [Wilberforce], Foundation of the Faith Assailed, p. 8. 182 chapter four vote of censure passed against him by a huge majority in Convocation on 5 May.218 In the Committee’s report, the hope was expressed that through their opposition to his appointment, they “may warn the younger part of our students against immediate danger”.219 One non-resident MA, John Chandler, likewise wrote that he voted against Hampden because “the youth of the University [we]re in immediate danger of being corrupted”.220 According to Thomas Arnold, in his famous “Oxford Malignants” article of April 1836, the main aim of the campaign against Hampden had been to “give an utterly inadequate and unjust view of [his] character as an instructor in positive Christianity”.221 Significantly, when the Tractarians discussed their opposition to Hampden, they were keen to emphasize that they received support, not only from the young MAs, but from a broad cross-section of university members. As Edward Churton declared in a reply to Arnold’s article: we “found support from so many accomplished men”, from “aged Churchmen of threescore and ten, and the youth of Oxford”.222 Unsurprisingly, Noetics like Whately were quick to deny these claims of broad-based support. He denounced what he saw as the hypocrisy of a movement which continued to preach about obedience to established authority while leading a campaign of persecution against a duly appointed university professor. “What becomes of a civil community”, he asked, if the members of it . . . take upon them utterly to set at nought all the constituted authority of the community, and proceed as plaintiff, judge, jury, and executioner, all in one, to right themselves, or wrong their neighbour, at their own pleasure, and, without reference to any regular magistrate, to

218 Nockles, “Lost Causes . . . and Impossible Loyalties”, p. 225. This move deprived Hampden of several important powers including the right to appoint select preachers and the right to take part in the judgement of heresy cases in the university. 219 Extract from the Report of the Committee Appointed March 5, 1836, p. 6. Trinity Col- lege Library G.4.11 (1). It is noteworthy that of the ten members of the committee two had been prominent student journalists in the 1810s and early 20s: John Henry Newman and Charles William Stocker. See Declaration of Resident Members of Convocation, upon the Nature and Tendency of the Publications of the Rev. Dr. Hampden, Trinity College Library G.4.11 (1). 220 [ J. Chandler], A Non-Resident M.A’s Self-Vindication for Attending to Support the Vote of Censure on Dr Hampden’s Writings (Oxford, 1836), p. 10. 221 [T. Arnold], “The Oxford Malignants and Dr Hampden”, Edinburgh Review 63:127 (April 1836), 231. 222 E. Churton, A Letter . . . on the Case of the Oxford Malignants and Dr. Hampden (Lon- don, 1836), p. 13. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 183

punish by taking away his property, or by banishment, death, &c. any one they might think deserving of it?223 P.B. Nockles has stated that the Hampden controversy “represented the zenith of Tractarian political influence within Oxford”.224 Somewhat para- doxically for a movement which prided itself on producing humble and obedient graduates, it also marked the high point of junior influence over the university reform debate. The prominence of the young in this period has not gone unnoticed by historians. Indeed, The History of the University of Oxford has designated the 1830s “an age of young men”;225 and Nockles has described the triumph of the Tractarians in the subscription controversy in the following terms which could be applied with equal justice to their success in the vote against Hampden: The de jure governors of the University, the Chancellor, and the heads, had been ignominiously brushed aside, and forced to follow lamely in the wake of the Tractarians, who as the mouthpiece of junior feeling, could be said . . . to be almost its de facto rulers. Their achievement fell little short of a democratic revolution in Oxford.226 Although starkly admitting the influence of the juniors at this point, what is missing from analyses like this is an accurate understanding of the origins of this development; in particular, an appreciation of the importance of long-term structural changes within the university itself. Too often, the prominence of young men in the controversies at Oxford in the 1830s has been seen as a peculiar product of the crises of 1828–32. The Noetics and Tractarians, with their respective plans for university reform, have been viewed as responding to a particular set of events on the internal culture of Oxford. The importance attributed to generational conflict as a factor in university politics is confined to the post-1830 period. As we have seen in the previous three chapters, however, the question of the power of the juniors had been a central issue for the reformers of 1800. It was not any external crisis (not even the French Revolution) which caused the younger part of the university suddenly to be seen as a threat. Such events only served to heighten the effect of pre-existing suspicions which went back at least as far as the widespread student rioting in the wake of George I’s accession in 1714. By the time of the French Revolution, commentators

223 E.J. Whately, Life and Correspondence Vol. I, p. 358. 224 Nockles, “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”, p. 226. 225 Brock and Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. VI, p. 193. 226 Nockles, “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”, p. 217. 184 chapter four within and outside Oxford were claiming that relations between tutors and pupils had never been more strained. Combining to add more pressure was the fact that the average matriculation age had reached eighteen for the first time, meaning most students would now reach the age of twenty-one (and thus the legal age of majority) while still at university.227 This made it increasingly difficult for tutors (whose average age, we have seen, was likely falling at this time)228 to act in loco parentis. In addition to the changing nature of tutor-pupil relations, reformers made the crucial mistake in the disagreements which followed the Statute of 1800 of addressing their competing reform proposals directly to junior members. Arguably, reformers like Edward Tatham had little choice, having no other viable constituency to which to appeal after both the Hebdomadal Board and Convocation had made it clear that, as far as they were concerned, discussion was closed. Nonetheless, when defenders of the 1800 Statute, most notably, Copleston, began addressing their own comments to the juniors in the period after 1810, they were effectively brought into the debate and made to feel as though they had a stake in the decision-making process. Within a few years, the juniors themselves began to express their own views about university reform in print and, in the period between 1818 and 1824, arguably dominated the debate with the sheer number of publications. As we have seen in this chapter, the 1824 Statute was criticized by many senior members as a measure deliberately designed to appease junior frustrations. In the early years of their participation in the debate, junior commentators had tended to favour the views of radical reformers like Tatham, inside Oxford, and Sydney Smith and the other Edinburgh Reviewers, outside. However, when a combination of Noetics and other senior members succeeded in throwing out the 1824 Statute, as it had been proposed by the heads, they began to incline more towards the moderate liberal position of the Noetics. Indeed, it is arguable that the Noetics, as a group, owed much of their success in the late 1820s to their ability to convince Oxford’s senior members that they alone were capable of preventing further intergenerational tension. The Statute of 1830 was, in many ways, a Noetic project, a combination of an extensive consultation with Convocation and a set of provisions designed to show undergraduates that senior members were interested in their welfare and were committed, over time, to bringing in some of the changes

227 See above, p. 23. 228 See above, p. 24. noetics, tractarians and the peak of junior influence 185 they wished to see. On the other hand, however, senior authority (as represented especially by tutors and examiners) was to be bolstered, with juniors having far less opportunity to challenge the decisions or question the competence of senior members. However, with the shocking events of 1828–32, the liberal position of the Noetics came, very quickly, to be viewed with suspicion. Despite all their protestations to the contrary, they were accused, just as the heads had been in 1824, of deliberately seeking to strengthen the junior position. As early as the autumn of 1830, an impressive coalition had formed to oppose Noetic reform and the Statute of 1830 failed on its first proposal to Convocation and was only passed at the second attempt with significant modifications. Spearheading this opposition were several future Tractar- ians including Newman and H.W. Wilberforce. Significantly, a similar claim to be able to guarantee senior authority in the face of renewed fears about junior members played a significant role in bringing the Tractarians to prominence over the next couple of years. An emphasis on the principle of junior obedience and a classical syllabus which would not have looked out of place at a public school defined the Tractarian approach to university reform in the early 1830s. Despite this, however, Newman and his associates could not escape their own dependence on the youth of the university. The movement’s leading members were themselves noticeably younger than their Noetic rivals and a number of them had been prominent as critical student journalists in the 1810 and 20s. It was, moreover, clear to many on both sides that they would never have succeeded in their campaigns against subscription and Hampden’s appointment to the professorship had they not enjoyed the support of the majority of young MAs in Convocation. The success they achieved in spreading their ideals among undergraduates was also undeniable; indeed, to form young minds in their image was the inevitable consequence of the new personal style of tuition promoted by the Tractarians since Newman’s early experiments at Oriel. They put together a heady cocktail of personal charisma and youthful enthusiasm and succeeded in winning a level of personal devotion from undergraduates perhaps unprecedented in the history of the university. Ultimately though, the same accusation which had undermined the Noetics in 1829–30 came back to haunt the Tractarians in the wake of their successful campaign against Hampden; the charge they had launched against the Regius Profes- sor (and the Noetics more broadly) of seeking to corrupt junior members was turned against themselves. As we shall see in the next chapter, this view of the Oxford Movement was to be important in convincing many 186 chapter four within and outside the university that governmental intervention in the form of a Royal Commission was necessary to stabilize junior-senior relations. Likewise, the conviction that the ultra-conservatism of the Oxford Movement had actually done more to encourage generational conflict at the university than the policies of the Noetics ever had, would be influential in determining the decidedly liberal character of the government- sponsored reforms of the early 1850s. Chapter Five

DEFENSIVE MODERNIZATION: THE TRACTARIAN THREAT AND THE ROYAL COMMISSION OF 1850

This chapter examines the dramatic shift in the perception of Tractarian- ism within Oxford over the course of the late 1830s and 1840s. It argues that, from being seen as a movement which encouraged students to value established tradition, it came itself, within a few short years, to be feared as the locus of a revolutionary youth movement engaging in crypto- Catholic theological speculations as dangerous to the Anglican establishment as any inspired by the ideology of the French Revolution. As we saw in the previous chapter, the successful campaign against Hampden marked the high point of both junior and Tractarian influence within the university. In its wake, we see the first widespread criticism of Tractarian- ism with particular reference to its corrupting effect on undergraduates and bachelors. With senior opinion shifting decidedly against the leaders of the Oxford Movement, both opponents and supporters feared a full- scale rebellion by their younger followers, culminating perhaps in a mass secession to Rome. Here, it is argued that in order to understand fully the motivations driving the famous reforms of mid-century, carried out, in part, by the Hebdo- madal Board and, in part, by the 1854 Oxford University Act, the changes introduced need to be considered against this background. In particular, such an approach challenges Sheldon Rothblatt’s claim that the reforms of mid-century were primarily the product of a zeal for modernization and improvement.1 The unchecked influence of Tractarianism over the junior body and the increasingly erratic behaviour of students in the wake of the Hampden affair was one of the central factors which prompted the Earl of Radnor to renew calls for a Commission of Inquiry in 1837. Like- wise, it was the unprecedented breach which opened up between junior and senior members following the suspension of Pusey from preaching in 1843 and the degradation of W.G. Ward in 1844, which, in part, led MPs, W.D. Christie and James Heywood, to call for immediate parliamentary intervention.

1 Rothblatt, “The first undergraduates recognizable as such”, p. 171. 188 chapter five

The unpredictability of Tractarian juniors was likewise a major factor behind the emergence of a coherent reform movement within Oxford itself. A group of young tutors and MAs, led by Benjamin Jowett and A.P. Stanley, was similarly concerned about the frequent shows of disrespect to senior members and the increasing isolation of the Hebdomadal Board. Inspired by the Noetic reformers of the 1830s and supported by many of the university’s tutors, they convinced the Board to countenance radical changes to the syllabus and examination system. By embarking on what may be termed a policy of ‘defensive modernization’,2 by introducing new Honour Schools in modern history and law and mathematics and physical science, the liberals hoped to counter the Tractarian fascination with the medieval past and the intricacies of theological controversy. Although representing real change, the reforms did not go far enough for many Oxford liberals, who felt that if the hold of Tractarianism was to be broken, the whole system of religious tests had to be done away with. The university must be opened up to a much greater proportion of the country’s population. A more diverse undergraduate body would make it more difficult for a single theological faction to dominate. Likewise, reformers at Oxford demanded all fellowships (and the scholarships which led to them) be fully opened to competition. To achieve these goals, Stanley and Jowett lobbied Lord John Russell who proceeded to appoint a Commis- sion dominated by Oxford liberals such as Stanley and Goldwin Smith and old Noetics like Baden Powell and Samuel Hinds. Although a Commission was likewise appointed for Cambridge in 1852, it will be argued here that the government’s primary interest was in regulating student behaviour at Oxford. Thus Cambridge was treated very differently, often held up by the Oxford Commissioners as a model for Oxford to emulate. Embodying many of the desired reforms, the Commissioners’ report was warmly welcomed by Oxford liberals when it was published in 1852, while the threat of external interference caused the Hebdomadal Board to reject the report outright. Parliamentary opinion was moving decisively in favour of reform and the Commissioners’ recommendations were soon embodied in a bill drafted by Jowett. With the passage of the Oxford University Act in 1854, the power of Tractarianism within the university was effectively broken. In the words of P.B. Nockles, the Act saw

2 For a discussion of this term and its application to university reform, see Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914, p. 54. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 189 the Oxford Movement receive its “last rites”.3 After this, we have to look outside the university for the continuing influence of Tractarianism.

‘A Dangerous and Successful Conspiracy’ 4

In the immediate wake of the Hampden affair, it was not simply Noet- ics like Whately who condemned the high-handedness and disrespect for established authority displayed by the Tractarians. As Nockles has correctly pointed out, within just a few months it is possible to see the considerable cross-party support enjoyed by the Oxford Movement in its prosecution of Hampden begin to collapse.5 One of the first to express his concern was Peter Maurice, the low-church Chaplain of New College. Already in 1837, he condemned the attempts of Newman and Pusey to subvert “the spirit of the discipline established in this . . . University” “Their standing . . . enables them”, he wrote, with particular reference to New- man’s position as Vicar of St Mary’s, “to propagate most extensively their singular theories”. Denouncing their ideas as popery, pure and simple, he lamented their popularity and the “great influence” they enjoyed “over the minds of many of our young men”.6 A visitor from Cambridge din- ing with fellows at Queen’s in 1837 reported hearing it confidently stated “that nothing could withstand the influence” of the Tractarians and that “every man of talent who during the last 6 years has come to Oxford, has joined Newman”.7 It should be added that it was in part a growing sense of unease about the degree of personal influence which Newman, Hurrell Froude and R.I. Wilberforce were exercising over undergraduates in their capacity as tutors at Oriel which led the Provost, Edward Hawkins, to effectively dismiss them from their tutorships as early as 1830 by refusing to assign any more pupils to them.8 Concern about the influence enjoyed by Newman and Pusey over the student body was one of the main factors behind the Earl of Radnor’s renewed calls in the House of Lords for the appointment of a Commission

3 Nockles, “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”, 267. 4 “University Reform”, Oxford Protestant Magazine 2 (1848), 5. 5 Nockles, “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”, 233. 6 P. Maurice, The Popery of Oxford Confronted, Disavowed, and Repudiated (London, 1837), p. 70. 7 J.F. Russell to P. Maitland (18 November 1837), cited in Nockles, “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”, 232. 8 K.C. Turpin, “The Ascendancy of Oriel” in Brock and Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. VI, pp. 189–90. 190 chapter five of Inquiry to visit Oxford. In a speech on 11 April 1837, he referred to the dramatic fall-off in the academic achievement of the university in the years since the Tractarians had risen to prominence. Citing the evidence of former Noetic, Baden Powell, now the Regius Professor of Astronomy, Radnor claimed that modern science was neglected there as never before, and even the classics, which Oxford claimed to cultivate particularly, were suffering as the attention of both tutors and students was dispro- portionately engaged with theological controversy.9 Although his call for a Commission failed after the Duke of Wellington, then Chancellor of Oxford, assured the house that the university would take urgent steps to reform itself, Radnor renewed his calls for parliamentary intervention in the December with especial reference to the illegality and subversive nature of the prosecution of Hampden the previous year. “In the insult they offered to Dr. Hampden”, he declared, “the University”, led by the Tractarians, “violated” their own statutes. The summary prosecution of a Regius Professor without a proper trial sent a dangerous message to junior members, teaching them that any member of the university, no matter how senior, was a suitable target of contempt and ridicule. “Without any accusation having been made, they were at once the accusers, the judges, and the executioners”, declared Radnor. The sentence against him was passed, “Dr. Hampden never having been summoned nor heard in his own defence”.10 The link between the growing influence of Tractarianism and renewed calls for parliamentary intervention was acknowledged by supporters of the Oxford Movement themselves. In an article in the Quarterly Review which appeared in January 1838, William Sewell derided “the rash or evil projects of change which are thrown out to destroy [Oxford’s] institutions”, on the basis of unsubstantiated charges that tutors there sought to “enslave the mind to a thoughtless admission of received doctrines and a bigoted subjection to their teachers”.11 Recognizing that the Earl of Rad- nor’s calls for a Commission were targeted primarily against Oxford and the Tractarian Movement, he remarked upon the distinct lack of criticism directed at Cambridge.12 Opponents of the Oxford Movement, writing in the periodical press, drew a similarly sharp distinction between England’s two ancient universities. Thus Bonamy Price, a prominent Noetic, writing

9 Hansard (HL Deb 11 April 1837 vol. 37 cc. 1041–2). 10 Quote by Earl of Radnor from Hansard (HL Deb 21 December 1837 vol. 39 cc. 1390). 11 [W. Sewell], “Memorials of Oxford”, Quarterly Review 61:121 ( January 1838), 205, 216. 12 Ibid., 207. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 191 in the British and Foreign Review in January 1838, condemned Tractarian- ism as “the party which reigns triumphant . . . among the majority of junior men at Oxford”.13 Calling for a Royal Commission to set things right,14 he denounced what he saw as the design of the Oxford Movement to “rob the mind of man of its independence, by enslaving the present to a grovelling imitation of the past”.15 Cambridge, on the other hand, received fulsome praise, its broader curriculum and greater focus on mathematics being held up as a model for Oxford to imitate.16 With the publication of the explosive first volume of Hurrell Froude’s Remains in March 1838, fears about the effect of Tractarianism on junior members were aroused even among many High Churchmen who had supported Newman and Pusey in their efforts against Hampden. To many it seemed as though the decision to publish the private thoughts and casual scribblings of Hurrell Froude, who had died some two years earlier, had been taken by the editors, Newman and Keble, with a view to attracting still more junior members to the movement.17 As William Sewell explained in his review of the work for The Quarterly Review in March 1839, they “must not complain . . . especially after their Preface, if the book is supposed to have a deeper meaning, and to exhibit either opinions which they wish to indicate, or a character held up for imitation”.18 The character revealed in the Remains of an angst-ridden young man, highly critical of the English Reformation and clearly attracted to the Church of Rome, horrified former allies among Oxford High Churchmen such as Edward Churton and Geoffrey Faussett, now Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity. In a university sermon given shortly after the appearance of the first volume, Faussett addressed the student body directly.19 He reminded them of their duty of obedience to senior members and to the established church. Accusing Newman and Keble of encouraging “ecclesiastical insubordination” and a dangerous “enthusiasm” in junior members,20 he traced

13 [B. Price], “The Oxford Calendar, 1837”, British and Foreign Review 6:11 ( January 1838), 104. 14 Ibid., 120. 15 Ibid., 104. 16 Ibid., 119–120. 17 See P. Brendon, “Newman, Keble and Froude’s Remains”, English Historical Review 87:345 (October 1972), 697–716. 18 [W. Sewell], “Oxford Theology”, Quarterly Review 63:126 (March 1839), 551. 19 G. Faussett, The Revival of Popery: A Sermon Preached Before the University of Oxford at St. Mary’s on May 20, 1838 (Oxford, 1838). The sermon is inscribed “To the Junior Stu- dents of the University of Oxford.” 20 Ibid., 12–14. 192 chapter five the recent shift in how the movement was perceived. At first, Newman and his friends had been viewed as “a combination of talent and learning and industry, directed to the same important objects with a zeal and a devotedness worthy of the purest age of Christianity”. Within a few years, however, they had become the object of “suspicion and even alarm, which the most candid and dispassionate observers no longer pronounce to be either vague or indefinite or unfounded”.21 Following the publication of the Remains, the Tractarians became once more the topic of parliamentary discussion. Froude’s hatred of the Reformation was cited in the Com- mons by Viscount Morpeth who declared the book to be such as “certainly would be likely to make disciples of a new school”. As MP for the university, William Gladstone was left to deny the charge that “Roman Catholic principles” were being inculcated at Oxford.22 Tractarianism came increasingly to be seen as a sinister conspiracy to “un-protestantize” the university and indeed the country as a whole through the conversion of as many students destined for the Church of England as possible. Following the refusal of many Tractarians to subscribe to the fund for the erection of a memorial to the Protestant bishops mar- tyred in the reign of Mary, the Vice-Chancellor himself, A.T. Gilbert, wrote to Wellington that he feared Newman and Pusey were active in spreading Catholic doctrines among the young.23 Baden Powell painted a similar picture in Tradition Unveiled, his response to the provocative Bampton Lectures of 1838 by H.A. Woodgate which emphasized the importance of tradition and apostolical succession in the Church of England. “Reports are in circulation”, he wrote, “of secret meetings and discussions in deep conclave, among the leaders and the initiated; of assemblies of a more popular character, suited to the mass of disciples; of means used . . . to

21 Faussett, The Revival of Popery, p. 12. The irony of a movement which had preached obedience to established authority and then increasingly behaved like a rebellious faction was not lost on other commentators too. See, for example, H. Rogers, “Puseyism, or the Oxford Tractarian School”, Edinburgh Review 78:156 (April 1843), 506: “The Oxford Tract writers and their adherents, have shown but small practical regard to that principle of unquestioning obedience which forms a prime article of their faith.” Such an irony is clear even in the comments of erstwhile allies of the Tractarians like William Sewell, who remarked in his Christian Morals (London, 1840), p. 541, that they were condemned as “theorists and inventors of novelties, in the same page which stigmatises them as bigots to antiquity and authority.” 22 Hansard (HC Deb 30 July 1838 vol. 44 cc. 818–9). 23 A.T. Gilbert to Wellington (29 December 1839), cited in Nockles, “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”, 237. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 193 entice and entrap novices of promising talent.”24 Parents too complained of the effects of Tractarianism upon their children. Sons, who had hitherto been well-mannered and obedient, were, they claimed, turned into self-willed rebels once in the clutches of the “Newmanites”. “ Who has bewitched you?”, one published letter asked desperately. “ You have been fascinated and seduced, along with many of your contemporaries . . . Shall we any longer suffer the principles of our Protestant youth to be corrupted by their own tutors?”25 In such letters, Tractarianism appears as a form of youth subculture, defined, above all, in opposition to the university authorities: “Is not Puseyism made a kind of fashion among many [undergraduates]? . . . Is it not a watch-word—a shibboleth—among them? Is there not a sort of juvenile and discipular pride in espousing these new notions?”26 Senior members were also worried by reports that many parents preferred to send their sons to Cambridge which, somewhat ironically, considering its more flexible attitude towards non-Anglicans, was considered safe by comparison.27 This growing breach between the Tractarians and the body of senior members reached a high point in February 1841 with the publication of Tract 90. Best known as the tract in which Newman argued that the Thirty- Nine Articles were compatible with Catholicism, it also marked the point at which the Hebdomadal Board came out openly against the movement. Following the famous Letter of the Four Tutors, in which A.C. Tait of Bal- liol, H.B. Wilson of St. John’s, J. Griffiths of Wadham and T.T. Churton of Brasenose denounced the views contained in the tract, it was publicly condemned by the Hebdomadal Board. Once more, the effect upon junior members was uppermost in the minds of those opposed to Tract 90. As the Vice-Chancellor Philip Wynter explained, the Board had denounced it primarily as a warning to junior members.28 The overwhelming rejection of the Tractarian candidate for the Oxford Poetry Professorship, Isaac Williams, by Convocation later in 1841 provides stark proof of the shift in the public perception of the Oxford Movement after Tract 90. The Board was also emboldened to take further moves against the Tractarians,

24 B. Powell, Tradition Unveiled: An Exposition of the Pretensions and Tendency of Authoritative Teaching in the Church (London, 1839), p. 3. 25 A Letter of Remonstrance to an Undergraduate of the University of Oxford concerning the Tenets of Dr. Pusey and Mr. Newman (Oxford, 1840), p. 5. 26 Ibid., 6. 27 Ibid., 20; [C. Wilson], The Listener in Oxford (London, 1840), p. 22. 28 “Memoir of Dr. Wynter” (1845), cited in Nockles, ‘Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loy- alties’, 243. 194 chapter five most provocatively, attempting to reinstate the full powers of Hampden as Regius Professor of Divinity by repealing the punitive statute of 1836. They also tried to give him a greater control over theological instruction within the university as head of a new Board of Theology. Although both moves failed to secure the approval of Convocation, the majorities were far smaller than in the original Hampden affair, revealing just how much ground the Tractarians had lost in the interim. In the wake of Tract 90, calls from within the body of Oxford’s senior members for urgent action were heard with growing frequency. “We cannot look upon them there, at Oxford”, wrote C.P. Golightly, an erstwhile supporter of the movement, “that nursery of moral and intellectual strength, alienating and perverting the hearts of those whose influence must hereafter tell upon every part of our national and ecclesiastical welfare, without the deepest anxiety.”29 In his correspondence with several popular newspapers, Golightly sought to warn parents of the “system- atic and untiring agitation” organized by the Tractarians with a view to recruiting their sons to their dangerous clique. “Newspapers, tracts, vol- umes, periodicals, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, decrying the Reformers and the Reformation . . . stealthily attacking Protestantism . . . are perpetu- ally rising from the press and are infusing the most dangerous opinions into the minds of the youth of the University, by the mere frequency of their repetition.”30 The consequence he envisaged for the university and the nation if something was not done to stop them was serious: “a torrent of insolent, assuming, fanatical, Jesuitical young clergy, full of hatred to the Reformers and the Reformation, and of predilection for the Church of Rome”.31 Like many others, he urged parents to send their sons to Cambridge.32 At the beginning of June 1843, Pusey was banned from preaching within the university for two years when the Hebdomadal Board deemed one of his sermons to have been heretical. Many young Tractarians took the move as a personal insult. It would not be an overstatement to describe the state of affairs at Oxford as that of a latent civil war between the Board, increasingly supported by senior opinion, and the Tractarian juniors. Buoyed up

29 C.P. Golightly, Correspondence Illustrative of the Actual State of Oxford with Reference to Tractarianism (Oxford, 1842), p. 24. See A. Atherstone, “Charles Golightly (1807–1885), Church Parties and University Politics in Victorian Oxford”, University of Oxford D. Phil. Thesis, 2000. 30 Ibid., 30. 31 Ibid., 35. 32 Ibid., 36. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 195 by a formal protest signed by some three hundred non-resident members of Convocation, which the Vice-Chancellor refused to entertain, junior members became increasingly open in their criticism of the heads. One pamphlet denounced the Board as so many “Inquisitors”, trampling on their right to “liberty of conscience”.33 Others denied publicly that the university had any authority to judge in ecclesiastical matters, it being merely a lay corporation.34 It was not simply in writing that young Tractarians expressed their support for Pusey. Increasingly, the Vice-Chancellor and Heads of Houses also had to reckon with public demonstrations in favour of the Oxford Movement. Most memorable was the unprecedented disturbance which took place on 28 June 1843 in the Sheldonian Theatre on the occasion of the annual Commemoration (Encaenia) ceremony when an honorary degree was to be awarded to Edward Everett, the American ambassador to Britain, and a Unitarian. George Cox, who witnessed the scene at first hand, described “one continued storm of yelling and hissing” from the undergraduates in the upper level of the Theatre which lasted for some three quarters of an hour and ultimately forced the “tired and disgusted” Vice-Chancellor to break up the proceedings early. He denounced the undergraduates as “rioters” and described the area of the Theatre where they were standing as the “Yelling-Gallery.”35 The events at Oxford made the headlines of the national newspapers. An article in The Times from 29 June condemned the “insubordinate proceedings on the part of the undergraduates of the University” and spoke of “a show . . . which it is impossible adequately to describe” and “which has been rarely equalled in the annals of the University.”36 Looking back at the events from 1851, James Heywood, who had so often called for a parliamentary commission to visit Oxford, ascribed the behaviour of undergraduates to “a somewhat juvenile desire of retaliation upon the University authorities, who had only a short time before suspended Dr. Pusey from the privilege of preaching before the University.”37 They were, moreover, encouraged and supported

33 A Letter to the Rev. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and the Learned Doctors who Assisted Him on a Late Occasion. From Torquemada the Younger (London, 1843), p. 12. 34 See, for example, H.A. Woodgate, Considerations on the Present Duty of the Univer- sity of Oxford with Reference to the Late Proceeding Against the Regius Professor of Hebrew (Oxford, 1843), p. 20. 35 G.V. Cox, Recollections of Oxford (London, 1868), p. 328. 36 “University Intelligence”, The Times (29 June 1843), p. 5; Issue 18335; col F. 37 Ward and Heywood eds., Statutes Vol. II, Appendix, p. 300. 196 chapter five by a considerable number of Tractarian MAs in the body of Convocation who shouted their opposition to the conferring of an honorary D.C.L. on a Unitarian.38 The Vice-Chancellor and heads of houses took swift action to punish the ringleaders and adopted measures to prevent similar occurrences in the future. On 29 June, Paul Parnell, a student of St. John’s College, who had recently secured a double first in his final examinations, was rusticated for a period of five years. Frederick Earnshaw Marshall of Brasenose College, who had also recently completed finals, was sent down for three years, his brother, John Marshall, also at Brasenose College, for three years, and J. Collyns, at Balliol, for twelve months. All four students had to leave the university immediately.39 In a statement to junior members shortly before the next Commemoration was due to be held, the Vice-Chancellor, Philip Wynter, criticised “the growing spirit of licence which has for several years been displayed on these occasions”, suggesting that some sort of disturbances had been taking place regularly under the period of Tractarian dominance. Junior members were “especially admonished to abstain from noise of every kind . . . and from every thing which may interrupt the actual business of the Commemoration” and “reminded that they [were] present only by permission, having no vote or place in the Convocation.” “It must be obvious”, he concluded, “that their future admission will be incompatible with the continuance of conduct unbecoming their rank and education, and derogatory to the character and credit of the University.”40 The reference here to “several years” of “growing licence” on the part of undergraduates receives confirmation from the unusually high number of statements from the Vice-Chancellor reminding junior members to adhere to the university statutes in the years immediately preceding the events of 28 June 1843. A wide array of practices came in for censure, including drag hunting,41 horse racing,42 and steeplechasing.43 Particularly condemned

38 W. Tuckwell, Reminiscences of Oxford (London, 1900), p. 151. According to Tuckwell (1829–1919), who would only have been a school boy at the time, the opposition among MAs was led by John Brande Morris at Exeter College and David Lewis at Jesus College. 39 Only the initials of those rusticated are given in Ward and Heywood eds., Statutes Vol. II, Appendix, p. 300. Their full names, however, can be established from the record of the Junior Proctor (W.E. Jelf ). See W.E. Jelf, “Note of sentences after a disturbance in the Theatre” (29 June 1843) Oxford University Archives, WPγ/8/9. 40 Ward and Heywood eds., Statutes Vol. II, Appendix, p. 301. 41 Ibid., Appendix, pp. 288, 303. A drag hunt is a hunt in which hounds follow an artificial trail of scent. 42 Ibid., Appendix, p. 288. 43 Ibid., Appendix, p. 288. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 197 was the growing tendency of undergraduates to dine outside of college in “inns, eating-houses” and “wine-shops” which suggests a particular concern to keep junior members within their colleges during their free time.44 Moreover, in the academic year 1842/3, the Junior Proctor, Wil- liam Edward Jelf, seems to have waged a particularly intensive campaign against undergraduate disorder in the town. Indeed, the resentment of junior members, as a body, against Jelf was another factor contributing to the disturbance in the Sheldonian on 28 June. According to the clergyman and schoolmaster, William Tuckwell, Jelf was “[d]exterous in capturing, offensive in reprimanding, venomous in chastising his victims”45 and that, as a result, “[t]he smarting undergraduates had sworn a solemn oath . . . to stop all proceedings until Jelf was driven out of the theatre.”46 It was even rumoured that he had gone so far as to hire private detectives to spy on undergraduates in their own rooms.47 Certainly, the records of the Oxford Police testify to the considerable personal activity of the Junior Proctor in the academic year 1842/3.48 However, it is likely that it was not simply the peculiar enthusiasm of Jelf for carrying out his duties as Junior Proctor that so aroused the hostility of junior members. The Tractarian supporters among them will most probably have interpreted Jelf ’s disciplinary cru- sade as directed specifically against them; for W.E. Jelf was the brother of Richard William Jelf of Christ Church, one of the six doctors whose report had led to Pusey’s suspension from preaching in the university. The degree of unity and determination displayed by junior members on 28 June provides some indication of the effect of Tractarianism in helping to generate a sense of common identity among undergraduates and bachelors. Indeed, the contumacy of those Tuckwell referred to as “the young lions of the Newmania”49 was such that even many erstwhile supporters of Tractarianism like William Sewell took every opportunity to urge junior members to restrain their behaviour and to remember the obedience they owed to their seniors. In a university sermon entitled, “The Duty of Young Men in Times of Controversy”, Sewell blamed the current atmosphere

44 Ward and Heywood eds., Oxford University Statutes Vol. II, Appendix, p. 304. 45 W. Tuckwell, Reminiscences of Oxford (London, 1900), p. 151. 46 Ibid., 152; this rumour was also mentioned by R.W. Church in a letter dated 28 June 1842 to Frederic Rogers. “They say that men had bound themselves not to stop until they drove Jelf out.” M.C. Church ed., Life and Letters of Dean Church (London, 1897), p. 47. 47 E. Longford, Wellington: Pillar of State (London, 1972), p. 414. 48 See, for example, Oxford Police Records, MSS. Top. Oxon. b. 140. No. 12 (29/30 Octo- ber 1842; 6/7 November 1842; 18 November 1842; 13/14 December 1842). 49 Tuckwell, Reminiscences of Oxford, p. 151. 198 chapter five between the Board and the juniors upon the “errors” and “extravagances” of “young, undisciplined, intemperate minds”.50 He urged them not to allow their feelings of loyalty to Newman and Pusey to lead them into rebellion against the university authorities. “From . . . sympathy to resentment, from resentment against authority to resistance, from resistance to party spirit, from party spirit to schism, and from schism to every other sin, the steps are short and easy”, he warned.51 He condemned the formation of “unauthorised combinations”52 amongst junior members and impressed upon them the words of 1 Peter 2, 13–15: “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the King as supreme; or unto governors”.53 Their duty, when dissatisfied with present arrangements in the church, was not to abandon her, he wrote, “not to raise our hand against our rulers . . . not to rebel, but to suffer”.54 The behaviour of undergraduates and the reactions of senior members remind us clearly of the Jacobite riots in the first half of the eighteenth century. In both cases, junior members were frequently charged with “disturbing the peace of the university”55 and increasing the likelihood of a parliamentary visitation.56 Such warnings were, however, for the most part, uttered in vain and fears of a full-scale rebellion against the university authorities and a mass secession to Rome continued to grow. The worries of senior members were particularly well captured by William Palmer, a former supporter of Newman and Pusey, in his 1843 pamphlet, A Narrative of Events Connected with the Publication of the Tracts for the Times. In particular, he lamented the emergence of “another generation” of Tractarians, predominantly composed of junior members and young MAs like Roundell Palmer and Frederick Oakeley, who had been active in spreading radical ideas since the Hampden Affair of 1836.57 In their admiration for Newman, Pusey and the other Tractarian leaders, they had created a dangerous subculture

50 W. Sewell, The Duty of Young Men in Times of Controversy (Oxford, 1843), p. 3. 51 Ibid., 6. 52 Ibid., 12. 53 Ibid., 19. 54 Ibid., 25–6. 55 See, for example, Ward and Heywood eds., Statutes Vol. II, Appendix, pp. 308, 319. 56 For the fear that student riots would bring about a royal visitation of the university in the first half of the eighteenth century, see above pp. 34–5. 57 W. Palmer, A Narrative of Events Connected with the Publication of the Tracts for the Times with Reflections on Existing Tendencies to Romanism and on the Present Duties and Prospects of Members of the Church (Oxford, 1843), p. 30. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 199 within the university. There arose among them, wrote Palmer, “a feeling of implicit submission of uninquiring obedience. We even saw every little peculiarity of speech, or gait, or manner, sedulously copied, certain names even heard with awe . . . We beheld every peculiarity and novelty of doctrine, every thing that was startling or perplexing to sober-minded men, instantly caught up, disseminated, erected into an article of Catholic faith by young and ardent spirits”.58 It was this “new school,”59 rather than New- man and Pusey, that he blamed for “the development of extreme opinions, the temerity of assertion which day by day seemed to acquire fresh vigour from the reproofs which it encountered.”60 Their most important means of attacking the Church of England and the university, according to Palmer, was the British Critic, which had fallen entirely under Tractarian editorial control from 1837 onwards. He claimed that “a permanent evil” had been done by the articles published in the journal since that time and that nothing more clearly revealed the radical nature of the Oxford Movement. “The continual cry of the “British Critic” for “development”, “progress”, “change”, “expansion of ideas”, the actual and fearfully rapid progress of individual minds, the unsettlement of principles and notions openly avowed; all is calculated to create very serious uneasiness and alarm. Such impetuosity and recklessness seem better fitted to revolution- ize than to reform.”61 Having developed, by this point, something of a persecution complex, Newman and Pusey were keen to take ever bolder steps in their opposition to the Hebdomadal Board. In the autumn of 1844, they took the provocative decision to oppose the election of the next Vice-Chancellor, Benjamin Symons, Warden of Wadham, who had supported the Noetics over subscription in 1834.62 In Pusey’s words, they intended it as a “protest” against the “heretical decisions” of the Board.63 Vastly over-calculating the amount of support they continued to enjoy among non-residents, when the issue was put to a vote of Convocation, the Tractarians suffered an overwhelming defeat of 882 votes to 183.64 It was this move, more than any other, which served finally to convince Wellington of the danger

58 Palmer, A Narrative of Events Connected with the Publication of the Tracts for the Times, p. 34. 59 Ibid., 44. 60 Ibid., 30. 61 Ibid., ix. 62 See above, p. 179 fn. 202. 63 H.P. Liddon, Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey Vol. II (London, 1894), p. 412. 64 Ibid., 412. 200 chapter five posed by the Oxford Movement and of the need for urgent parliamentary intervention.65 Resentful of the heads’ victory, Roundell Palmer likened the members of the Hebdomadal Board to “dictators”, whose arbitrary will should “not be submitted to by those who ha[ve] the power to resist it”.66 The mood of the younger Tractarians was not improved by the public punishment of one of their own, W.G. Ward, at the hands of the Board when he published what many felt amounted to pure propaganda for the Church of Rome, The Ideal of a Christian Church, in late 1844. Although the protests against Ward’s degradation came from men of varying religious opinions,67 it was the vehement attacks of the younger Tractarians which left a lasting impression on the heads of houses.68 Extra precau- tions were taken to prevent a repetition of the scenes at the Encaenia the year before when junior members, angry at the preaching ban imposed on Pusey, disrupted and eventually broke up the proceedings. To that end, the Vice-Chancellor, Benjamin Symons, and the heads of houses decreed that on 13 February 1845, the day appointed for Convocation to deal with the matter of Ward’s degradation “no strangers or members of the Uni- versity under the degree of M.A., B.C.L., or B.Med., be admitted within the outer entrances of the schools.”69 Thus not simply undergraduates but all junior members (including bachelors) were excluded from the Shel- donian Theatre itself and from the surrounding area. Despite these additional security measures, Tractarian juniors made their support for Ward clear. As an article in the British Magazine reported, he was “cheered by the undergraduates outside” as he left the Theatre. “The Vice-Chancellor”,

65 Nockles, “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”, p. 257. 66 R. Palmer to J.R. Godley (24 November 1844), cited in Nockles “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”, p. 257. 67 Critical pamphlets were written by a number of opponents of the Tractarian movement. See, for example, A.C. Tait, A letter to the Rev. the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, on the Measures Intended to be Proposed to Convocation on the 13th of February, in Connexion with the Case of the Rev. W.G. Ward, M.A. (Edinburgh and London, 1845); W.W. Hull, The Month of January: Oxford (London, 1845); J. Garbett, The University, the Church, and the New Test, A Letter to the Bishop of Chichester (London, 1845). 68 See, for example, C. Marriott, Reasons for Voting Against the Proposed Censure of Certain Propositions Extracted from a Work Recently Published by the Rev. W.G. Ward, M.A (1845); F. Oakeley, The Subject of Tract XC Historically Examined (London 1845); W.G. Ward, An Address to Members of Convocation in Protest Against the Proposed Statute (London, 1845). For a review of a large number of pamphlets protesting against Ward’s degradation, see “Mr. Ward and the University of Oxford”, Eclectic Review New Series 17:81 (May 1845), 509–39. For the contempt shown towards the Hebdomadal Board by young Tractarian pamphleteers, see p. 516. 69 Ward and Heywood eds., Statutes Vol. II, Appendix, p. 331. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 201 on the other hand, “was saluted most indecorously with hisses from the same source.”70 With the events at Oxford attracting considerable interest from the press, The Times condemned Ward and his undergraduate supporters as “undutiful and rebellious” and expressed the hope that the degradation would serve as a “salutary terror for the time to come” and prevent further disturbances by “contumacious offenders” among the student body.71 If the records of the Oxford Police are any indication, this hope may well have been in vain. In the period immediately preceding and following Ward’s degradation, there appears to have been a marked increase in undergraduate violence. At Christ Church and St. John’s, for example, undergraduates lit illegal bonfires within the college quadran- gles.72 Although we cannot be certain that these were connected with the degradation of Ward (as the police records do not provide information about the aims of the students responsible), it remains a strong possibility. In the midst of the many protests from Tractarian juniors against the decision to degrade Ward from his degree, the former Vice-Chancellor, A.T. Gilbert, confessed his fear to C.P. Golightly that “these reckless men will bring a visitation upon the university, if they are not stopped”.73 Looking back, many years later, in his autobiography, Newman himself admitted that by this point he had lost control of his younger followers.74 Renewed calls for a parliamentary visitation were exactly what followed the outrage which greeted the degradation of Ward. Within a few short months, W.D. Christie launched the first of what would become his annual attempts to convince a parliament increasingly favourable to reform, to appoint a Royal Commission to visit Oxford. The main reason he gave for his revisiting this vexed question was the unprecedented influence gained over Oxford undergraduates in recent years by Tractarianism— in Christie’s words, that “theological movement which has of late . . . fixed the attention of all Christendom upon Oxford” and “plunge[d] her into all the bitterness of fierce theological warfare”.75 “On their first arrival in Oxford”, he wrote, undergraduates are made

70 “The University of Oxford. Mr Ward’s Case”, The British Magazine 27 (1845), 302. 71 The Times, Friday, Feb 14, 1845; pg. 5; Issue 18847; col D. 72 Oxford Police Records, MSS. Top. Oxon. b. 140. No. 14 (7/8 February 1845). 73 A.T. Gilbert to C.P. Golightly, (20 September 1844), cited in Nockles, “Lost Causes and . . . Impossible Loyalties”, p. 258. 74 Newman, Apologia, p. 160. 75 Quote by W.D. Christie from Hansard (HC Deb 10 April 1845 vol. 79 c. 404). 202 chapter five

the early victims of an ever-watchful proselytizing zeal—and which threat- ens to absorb every member and every function of the University in the vor- tex of theological controversy, and to blight for ever, with its all-withering influence, in Oxford, the peaceful happiness of those years of college education which our memories and imaginations combine to paint to us in colours so fresh and fair.76 The state of virtual civil war which currently existed between the heads and the younger followers of Newman and Pusey was, he mused, entirely the fault of compulsory subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Nothing showed more clearly the urgent need for parliamentary intervention to remove it. The chaos at Oxford, he declared, “now places in the strongest possible light before the world the futility and the mischief of her forced subscription to the Articles of the Church”. “What”, he asked the champions of subscription, is the result of all your endeavours to unite the Universities and the Church in an indissoluble theological alliance . . .? Why that . . . after having been long kept down by the heavy incubus of Oxford . . . conservatism, learning has at last proclaimed her independence—burst your theological fetters; ay, and dragged the Church after the Universities into a latitude of theological speculation which . . . is utterly subversive of the foundations of your Church; and the Church of England is at this moment shaken to its centre.77 As if to prove Christie right, just a few weeks after the speech had been delivered, Newman himself seceded to Catholicism and left the university forever. More worryingly, he took with him a significant number of Oxford junior members.78

Reform within Oxford

The deteriorating relations between junior and senior members also provided the spur for many of the reform projects developed within the university in the 1840s. The stand-off between the Hebdomadal Board and the Tractarian juniors was as worrying for senior members within Oxford as it was for those in Parliament. Most notably, there emerged a group of young liberal MAs, fellows and tutors of colleges, led by Benjamin Jowett

76 Quote by W.D. Christie from Hansard (HC Deb 10 April 1845 vol. 79 c. 407). 77 Quote by W.D. Christie from Hansard (HC Deb 10 April 1845 vol. 79 c. 404). 78 For a list of undergraduates and bachelors who seceded to Rome between 1841 and 1847, see “Oxford Seceders to Romanism”, Oxford Protestant Magazine 1 (1847), 245–8. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 203 and A.P. Stanley, whose interest in modernizing reform developed over the course of the 1840s. Most historians who have examined the mid- century reforms at Oxford have commented on the important links with the Noetic school which characterized the group of young liberals. An admiration for Thomas Arnold, in particular, and attendance at Rugby school were a particularly significant link, connecting many members of the group.79 Few, however, have noticed that it was not merely the commitment to a degree of modernizing reform which the liberals shared with the Noetics, but also the ultimately conservative aim behind it—to try and improve the relationship between junior and senior members. In September 1846, Jowett declared in a letter to his close friend and fellow reformer, R.R.W. Lingen, his belief that there was “a general wish to put a stop as fast as possible to the puerilities of Oxford”.80 Specifically, Jowett complained that an “artist-like perception of right and wrong” had come, through the Tractarian preference for poetry and composition, to characterize the views of many undergraduates. It was a perception he found intellectually unmanning. “One has such a weak hold on the world”, he wrote, “or on other people—you acquire a sort of feeble intelligence of everything and lose force of mind and character”.81 Like many others, he condemned the “narrowness” and “artificiality” of Oxford studies by mid- century. What “a soil”, he complained, “for maggots and crotchets of all sorts, fostering a sort of weak cleverness, but greatly tending to impair manliness, straightforwardness and other qualities which are met with in the great world”.82 By contrast, he insisted that the value of an Oxford degree should lie in “the experience of life gained . . . and the consequent improvement of character”. This necessitated the permission of a certain degree of freedom to undergraduates both in the subjects studied and in the surveillance exercised by college tutors. In this respect, he identified himself as a “humble imitator of [Thomas] Arnold”.83 Jowett stressed the need for the liberals to behave as examples of the kind of manly

79 A.H. Clough, A.P. Stanley, John Conington, Richard Congreve and W.C. Lake had been at Rugby under Arnold. A.C. Tait and Frederick Temple had both been at Balliol before teaching at Rugby. Jowett called himself a “humble imitator” of Arnold in 1849 and Stanley was his biographer. 80 Balliol College Library, Jowett Papers. I.F.1/7. B. Jowett to R.R.W Lingen (22 Septem- ber 1846). 81 E. Abbott and L. Campbell (eds.), Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A. (London, 1899), p. 160. 82 Ibid., 279–80. 83 Ibid., 53. 204 chapter five education which they wanted to promote at Oxford. We “cannot be too independent”, he told Stanley, “you and I . . . must take our own line and act according to our character . . . We must act boldly and feel the world around us as a swimmer feels the resisting stream . . . steady perseverance and judgement are the requisite”.84 The belief that it was the damage done to junior-senior relations by Tractarianism which acted as the chief driver of reform within the university was widespread among the Oxford liberals. Goldwin Smith, a prominent member of the group, interpreted the entire reform movement as a “liberal reaction against Newmanism”.85 Richard Congreve and J.B. Blackett expressed similar convictions in an article which appeared in the British and Foreign Review in July 1843. “Oxford is daily becoming more and more a mere school of theology”, they complained. “Theology and its concomitants absorb nearly the whole industry” of students.86 In offering a brief history of the recent growth of interest in reform at Oxford, they linked it clearly with the shift in the perception of Tractarianism following the Hampden affair of 1836. “None of the higher ecclesiastical authorities was likely to step forward to discountenance a system so submissive in professions to their authority”, they wrote. “But now all is changed. The useful ally has begun to be a most dangerous enemy.”87 The need to take action to win back the undergraduate body was only appreciated when it became clear that the professed “submission” of the Tractarians was merely a ruse designed to obscure their real plans for “revolution” in the university and in the church.88 They described Tract 90 as “the finishing- stroke” which “awoke [senior members] from their dream of security”.89 In setting out their plans for reform, they praised the proposals made by the Noetics in the 1820s and 1830s and called, in particular, for the repeal of the punitive statute against Hampden.90 Although several of the old Noetics including Copleston, Whately and even Hampden were not prepared to support the kind of radical change

84 Balliol College Library, Jowett Papers. III.S.36. B. Jowett to A.P. Stanley (1 January 1849). 85 E. Abbott and L. Campbell, Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett M.A. Vol. I (London, 1897), p. 177. 86 [R. Congreve and J.B. Blackett], “Oxford and Dr. Hampden”, British and Foreign Review 15:29 ( July 1843), 171. 87 Ibid., 186–7. 88 Ibid., 186–7, 191. 89 Ibid., 187. 90 Ibid., 186–7. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 205 demanded by the liberals, others recognized the similarities between the two groups and supported their plans enthusiastically in the liberal periodical press. Baden Powell, for example, wrote two articles for the British and Foreign Review in January and April 184491 deeply critical of Tractarianism in which he argued that modernizing reform, on a scale which the Noetics had been unwilling to countenance in the 1820s,92 was needed to uproot it and prevent its recurrence. In particular, he highlighted the Tractarians’ skill in playing with language so as to clothe novelties in the language of conservatism and respect for the traditional syllabus.93 For Baden Powell, the purely classical and theological curriculum at Oxford had aided the rise of Tractarianism, and its removal (or substantial alteration) by a timely injection of modern studies would prevent such a thing happening in the future. He also supported the call of the liberals for an intermedi- ary examination at the end of the second year. If students were occupied throughout their university career, they would have no time in which to be distracted by the Tractarian “religion of . . . fancy . . . which pleases itself with idle imaginations, . . . futile and childish inconsistencies, . . . self- contradictory assertions . . . [and] arrogant . . . bravadoes”.94 A mature and challenging education, punctuated by regular trials of ability, was needed to counter the childlike and romantic appeal of Tractarianism. Another Noetic who wrote in support of the Oxford liberals was Nassau Senior. Once again, he linked the need for modern reform with the considerable damage wrought in Oxford by more than a decade of Tractar- ian dominance. He made an emotive comparison with Cambridge, whose achievements in science should be looked to as a model for Oxford to imitate. “Few Oxford men will be bigoted enough to deny”, he wrote, “that at the bar, on the bench, in science—in short, wherever success depends on moral and intellectual vigour and independence, Cambridge now has, and long has had, the decided superiority.”95 That this was the case in spite of the fact that Cambridge admitted dissenters to read for degrees (requiring a declaration of conformity to the Church of England only at

91 [B. Powell], “Anglo-Catholicism”, British and Foreign Review 16:31 ( January 1844), 1–29; [B. Powell], “Anglo-Catholicism. The Oxford Controversy”, British and Foreign Review 17:33 (April 1844), 136–165. 92 We remember that following the 1830 Statute Baden Powell became increasingly disillusioned with his fellow Noetics and advocated much greater independence and recognition for mathematics and the natural sciences at Oxford. See above, pp. 172–3. 93 [Powell], “Anglo-Catholicism”, 3–4. 94 Ibid., 29. 95 [N.W. Senior], “Oxford and Mr. Ward”, Edinburgh Review 81:164 (April 1845), 385–98. 206 chapter five graduation) was a strong proof that Oxford should also lessen or remove entirely its own religious tests. The last ten years had clearly revealed that a much greater threat had been posed by the ostensibly ‘submissive’ and ‘conservative’ Tractarians. Like many others, Senior compared the much calmer atmosphere at Cambridge with the state of virtual civil war visible in contemporary Oxford. ‘It is safe’, he declared, ‘to send a young man to Cambridge’ No establishments for conversion have been erected in her neighbour- hood. Her fellows do not declare their abhorrence of Protestantism . . . Her combination rooms are not hostile camps, nor her colleges or her pulpits instruments for the propagation of contradictory precepts . . . Her public- lectures have not become deserts—nor her divinity schools scenes of wran- gling . . . Her Vice-Chancellor is not assailed by defiances from graduates, demanding to be degraded. She does not exhibit, in short, the symptoms which precede political dissolution.96 It is a measure of just how significant a role Tractarianism played in the origins of the reform movement at Oxford that the first serious proposals were put to the heads of houses in the months immediately following Newman’s conversion, when fears of a mass secession among juniors were highest. While Jowett, Stanley and the other liberals were still discussing their reform ideas in early 1846, several of the university professors sent a memorandum to the Hebdomadal Board demanding greater recognition in the curriculum and examination system for the modern subjects they taught as well as a more prominent role for themselves in the teaching and government of the university.97 Crucially, they presented these radical proposals in terms of their ability to appeal to junior members and weaken the influence of Tractarianism, which, they argued, lay primarily in the dominance of the college tutorial system over instruction and preparation for examination. In March 1848, some 59 out of the 63 tutors in the university delivered a similar memorial to the Board, requesting that Honours Schools in subjects such as modern history, law and natural science be introduced alongside Literae Humaniores in a bid to break the fascination of juniors with the medieval past.98 Predictably, however, they did not follow the professors in seeking to undermine the tutorial system upon which their own positions depended. They simply claimed it had

96 [Senior], “Oxford and Mr. Ward”, 397–8. 97 W.R. Ward, “From the Tractarians to the Executive Committee” in Brock and Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford Vol. VI, p. 313. 98 Ibid., 313. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 207 been abused under the influence of Tractarianism which had converted it from an instrument of sound moral and academic instruction into a means of inculcating heretical opinions. By this point, the Board had become so isolated within the university that it had little choice but to cooperate with the general wish for reform, expressed by the tutors, professors and, increasingly, also by the Oxford liberals. In the summer of 1848, it appointed a committee to examine the various reform suggestions and negotiated freely with the different interest groups about the kinds of changes they would like to see. The even- tual product of these discussions were the new Examination Statutes of 1849 and 1850 which introduced the most radical changes into Oxford’s curriculum in the history of the university. Thanks chiefly to the support they received from Francis Jeune, Master of Pembroke, Jowett and the other liberals played an important part in the framing of the new statutes. In accordance with their wishes (and those of the majority of college tutors), they saw the addition, for the first time, of Honour Schools in modern history and law and in natural science. The liberals’ most obvious contribution, though, may be seen in the addition of a ‘second examination’ at the end of the second year which Jowett, in particular, had been suggesting for a number of years.99 The reasoning behind this proposal was fundamentally Noetic in nature, being based on the assumption that junior members would be better behaved if their time were more usefully occupied with subjects which they wanted to study and which they found challenging. In Literae Humaniores, for example, classical philology was to be primarily confined to the first year of the university course, after which, subjects, which were considered more difficult, such as ethics, logic and ancient history, were to be introduced gradually in stages as the student progressed through the course and matured intellectually.100 The Noetics’ attempts at liberal reform in the late 1820s had been cut short by the crisis of 1828–32, in particular, the revolution in France, which had lent support to the then-conservative approach of Newman and the Tractarians.101 By 1849/50, however, conditions favoured a return to an emphasis on modern studies, Tractarianism having been discredited as a more radical and threatening youth movement than any inspired by Jacobin sentiment. It is likewise important to consider the Board’s change

99 Jowett, “The Second Examination”, Jowett Papers, II.E.3/1. 100 Ibid. 101 See above, p. 167. 208 chapter five of attitude in the light of the continental revolutions of 1848. Many more students had taken an active part in anti-government violence in the spring of 1848 than in the French Revolution or in the revolution of 1830, which is likely to have raised existing fears about the volatility of junior members at Oxford.102 The lesson learned by several European governments in the immediate aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, namely that a willingness to negotiate with the students and to introduce limited reform was much more effective in restoring calm than a conservative crackdown, may also have helped the heads to see the potential benefits of reform.

The Royal Commission of 1850

Unlike the majority of the tutors and professors, however, the liberals, led by Jowett and Stanley, were anxious not only for a degree of modern reform but also for a parliamentary commission. They felt that without government intervention the kind of reforms needed to ensure that no single theological party could hold sway over the juniors again would never be achieved. Most controversially, perhaps, they sought an end to compulsory subscription. This, they argued, would ensure an undergraduate body much more diverse in its religious views and therefore less amenable to domination by a single faction. In addition, they wanted university extension on a scale which the Hebdomadal Board was unwilling to countenance, particularly in the form of so-called ‘unattached students’, whose costs would be substantially reduced by their ability to live outside the traditional college system. The recruitment of students from a much wider range of social backgrounds would, the liberals believed, increase undergraduate interest in modern studies and counter the Tractarian predilection for the medieval past. In their desire for a Commission they had some important allies in the university, most notably, Francis Jeune, Mas- ter of Pembroke, H.H. Vaughan, Regius Professor of Modern History, and H.B. Wilson, one of the four tutors who wrote against Tract 90 in 1841. Amid widespread reporting of the participation of university students in the 1848 revolutions and growing fears about Tractarian juniors at home, there developed an impassioned campaign in the periodical press

102 For student involvement in the revolutions of 1848, see Altbach, “Vanguard of Revolt: Students and Politics in Central Europe, 1815–1848”, 451–74; Robertson, “Students on the Barricades: Germany and Austria, 1848”, 367–379; Gallaher, The Students of Paris and the Revolution of 1848. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 209 for external intervention to set right abuses at Oxford. In particular, it was alleged that fear of innovation was so great at the university that the education provided had become so narrowly focused on philological exercises as to be scarcely fit for boys in a grammar school. While the majority of writers conceded that England’s youth needed appropriate guidance and surveillance to help them negotiate the transition to manhood, they took issue with a system which seemed to permit so little freedom that students left Oxford as superannuated boys incapable of exhibiting the independence and judgement of grown men. Once more, the influence of the Noetics is clear, most often through the praise bestowed on Thomas Arnold and the reforms he introduced at Rugby. One writer in Fraser’s Magazine in 1848 alleged that Oxford, under the influence of Newman and Pusey, had been returned to the “grammar school” of the eighteenth century, a system of education in which “the boyish element prevailed”.103 Since the rise of Tractarianism, Oxford’s tutors, with their infighting and theological controversy, had behaved little better than “big school-boys”.104 This was considered a fatal flaw when the majority of students, despite being men “in stature, in propensities, and in their own eyes” arrived steeped in the “perverseness” of boyhood.105 In particular, this writer argued, there had been a marked deterioration in the breadth of the classical syllabus; it was now so narrowly focused on Greek and Latin grammar that although a man was kept “upwards of three years ostensibly in preparation for the Church . . . they often send him on his vocation unable to write his own language, knowing little of any thing, and less . . . in many respects, than a charity-school boy”.106 Improvement could only come from subscribing to the principle of Thomas Arnold, that “a school [or university] is not a gaol in which to keep evil”; that it is far better to expel morally vicious and intellectually idle students so that the rest may be permitted a greater degree of manly independence.107 F.W. Newman, the translator of V.A. Huber’s recent work on The Eng- lish Universities,108 made the same point about Arnold in an article in The Prospective Review in 1849. The classics, he argued, had been cultivated in

103 “The Universities”, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 38:227 (November 1848), 586. 104 Ibid., 584. 105 Ibid., 585. 106 Ibid., 590. 107 Ibid., 589. 108 V.A. Huber, The English Universities, An Abridged Translation, ed., F.W. Newman (London, 1843). 210 chapter five a manly way at Rugby under his leadership. In preparation for university study, he had encouraged the sixth form to read Thucydides and thereby “to penetrate into the substance of an author with a manly intellect”. The state of classical learning in Oxford under the influence of Newman and now Pusey stood in stark contrast. “Demosthenes and Cicero are almost entirely neglected”, he wrote, “Greek and Latin history is studied with a painful and useless accuracy within certain limits, but is utterly ignored beyond those limits. Three or four treatises of Aristotle are elaborated with slavish anxiety, while the rest are never opened.”109 “For more than a dozen years”, he continued, “the appropriate studies of the place ha[ve] languished, all heart being eaten out of them by the new zeal for the Fathers, and by theological speculations, which . . . were sanctioned neither by Church or state”.110 However, for other journalists, Newman’s influence at Oxford had removed all confidence in classical education as a whole. The author of an article in the Oxford Protestant Magazine in 1848 lamented the recurrence of a “childish ignorance of men and things” in Oxford with the advent of the Tractarian movement.111 Like Baden Powell, he argued that in order to ensure the success of their “dangerous . . . conspiracy” against the Church of England, the Tractarians had turned the colleges into little more than “grammar shops” offering a paltry diet of construing and composition. By living in the past and despising modern studies, they had attempted to prevent the development of independent and manly thought among undergraduates. “What the age requires”, he wrote, “is something less of elegant heathen fiction—a less minute knowledge of the abominations of a people who perished of moral corruption and something more of studies having connection with human affairs in this nineteenth century.”112 An article by J.S. Blackie, professor of Greek at Edinburgh, which appeared in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in August 1849 presented a greater invest- ment in physical science as the answer to Oxford’s problems. For the last twenty years, he wrote, “the watchword has been ‘Catholicism and immovability’ ”.113 Thought had been “crushed” and students taught to “remain satisfied with assumed principles”.114 Young men educated under

109 F.W. Newman, “University Reform”, The Prospective Review 5:17 (1849), 6. 110 Ibid., 3. 111 Ibid., 5. 112 Ibid., 7. 113 [ J.S. Blackie], “The Present State of the University of Oxford—Its Defects and Rem- edies”, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine New Series 16 (August, 1849), 525. 114 Ibid., 528. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 211 this system, when they came to teach themselves, lacked the “maturity of mind” and “enlargement of thought” needed for the effective execution of the office of college tutor.115 An acquaintance with “three or four treatises of Aristotle, as many of Plato, ‘Butler’s Analogy and Sermons,’ and a total ignorance of all else which has ever been written on the subject, before or since, entitle a man to think himself worthy of a high rank as a man of science” in Oxford, declared Blackie. No wonder, he wrote, that it has so neglected the physical sciences and other “hearty studies” for they would prove “utterly subversive of the Oxford principles of mystical philosophy”.116 Writing a few months later at the beginning of 1850, Thomas Carlyle denounced the entire classical syllabus both at a public school and university level, suggesting that he saw little difference between the classical education received by school boys and young men at Oxford. “Our Etons and Oxfords”, he wrote, “with their nonsense-verses, college-logics, and broken crumbs of mere speech . . . old Grecian and Italian speech, dead and buried and much lying out of the way these two thousand years past” are surely the “most astonishing seminar[ies] for the training of young English souls to take command in human Industries, and act a valiant part under the sun!” “The State does not want vocables, but manly wis- doms and virtues”, he declared.117 He too could not resist a covert attack upon the pernicious influence of Tractarianism, condemning along with the classics, Oxford’s “ragfair” of “extinct monkeries . . . fit to smite the generations with atrophy and beggarly paralysis”.118 By early 1850, pressure was mounting on the government to intervene. Jowett, Stanley and Jeune had been urging Russell to appoint a Com- mission for some time, and on 23 April 1850 he took advantage of one of the (by now regular) motions of James Heywood, calling for a parliamentary inquiry, to do just that. The influence of the Oxford liberals and their Noetic supporters was clear from the start. The Commission was headed by none other than seasoned Noetic, Samuel Hinds; Baden Powell, A.C. Tait and Jeune himself were also made members. Among the younger liberals, W.C. Lake, who had been at Rugby under Arnold, was

115 [Blackie], “The Present State of the University of Oxford—Its Defects and Remedies”, 536. 116 Ibid., 528–9. 117 T. Carlyle, “The New Downing Street”, in Latter-Day Pamphlets (London, 1850), p. 167. 118 Ibid., 167–8. 212 chapter five appointed as a Commissioner while Stanley and Goldwin Smith were made secretaries. Not simply the Commission itself can be interpreted as anti-Tractarian in nature. The Unitarian M.P., James Heywood, who repeatedly called for a visitation of the university, was also motivated by a strong opposition to the Oxford Movement. In 1851, he published the second volume of Oxford University Statutes. It appeared at a critical time in the proceedings of the Royal Commission—after their visit to Oxford had been completed but before the publication of their official report and recommendations in 1852. At first sight, it appears to constitute little more than a historical record of university statutes from the period between 1767 and 1850.119 A closer inspection, however, reveals it to contain numerous passages of anti-Tractarian invective, the majority120 of which are located in footnotes to various items included in a lengthy appendix described as illustrating “the usual subjects of business brought before the academical convocation in Oxford” in the period between 1840 and 1846.121 Although in what follows there appear a handful of documents unrelated to the Tractar- ians, most are concerned with their dramatic fall from grace after 1840. Thus, we encounter in succession the resolution of the Heads of Houses against Tract 90,122 the suspension of Pusey from preaching,123 the contested election of Benjamin Symons as Vice-Chancellor,124 the degradation of Ward,125 and the conversion of Newman and his associates in 1845.126 Many of the selected items are not even official university documents but rather published letters (by Newman and others)127 as well as newspaper reports on various incidents involving prominent Tractarians such as the degradation of Ward.128 As such, the Appendix and the volume itself are much more than they first appear. They offer nothing less than a detailed and passionate anti-Tractarian commentary on the events of 1840 to 1846.

119 This is, moreover, what the volume itself claimed to be. See Ward and Heywood (eds.), Statutes Vol. II, p. v. 120 Some appear in the preface, where Heywood expressed particular contempt for Pusey and his role in the Hampden affair of 1836. See here, Ibid., lxxii. 121 Ibid., lxxi. 122 Ibid., Appendix, p. 264. 123 Ward and Heywood (eds.), Statutes Vol. II, Appendix, pp. 294ff. 124 Ibid., Appendix, p. 308. 125 Ibid., Appendix, pp. 327ff. 126 Ibid., Appendix, p. 380. 127 Ibid., Appendix, pp. 265–9, 297. 128 Ibid., Appendix, pp. 316, 337. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 213

The liberal influence which we noted in the composition of the Com- mission was no less clearly demonstrated in the recommendations which appeared in their report, published in 1852. It made no hesitation in rec- ommending the two key reform proposals of the Oxford liberals, namely an end to compulsory subscription129 and the admission of unattached students to the university.130 In addition to the argument that Oxford ought to become a truly ‘national’ university, open to all British citizens regardless of class or religion,131 like Jowett, Stanley and the other reformers, the Commissioners hoped that these changes would help counter the pernicious influence of Tractarianism and restore a healthy balance to junior-senior relations. Thus, when explaining the reasons behind its opposition to the establishment of independent halls for those students unwilling to subscribe the Thirty-Nine Articles, it warned of the possibility that “such Institutions may be made the means of fostering divisions in the University, since each zealous Theological party which may from time to time arise will seek to concentrate and perpetuate its influence by the establishment of its Hall.”132 They much preferred the proposed scheme of admitting so-called ‘unattached students’ who would be free to lodge in the town under conditions of appropriate supervision. Here, they looked to Cambridge as an example of how such a system might work successfully.133 Likewise, they expressed their support for another goal dear to the liberals—the reinvigoration of the long defunct professorial system, partly to act as an encouragement to the study of modern subjects and partly to help limit the influence of the tutorial system which had played such an important role in the rise of Tractarianism.134 Under Tractarian influence, they maintained, the tutor-pupil relationship had been too closely assimilated to that between a school master and his pupil and they hoped that the strengthening of professorial instruction might do much to counter this tendency. “Men cannot be governed like boys”, they warned, highlighting “the different age at which the students now come to the University.”135 Failure to take account of this over the previous two decades had resulted in the strained and difficult relations between junior and senior members visible at Oxford at the present time.

129 Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners, pp. 55–6. 130 Ibid., 42. 131 Ibid., 21, 36; Ibid., (Evidence), pp. 34, 73. 132 Ibid., 42. 133 Ibid., 53. 134 Ibid., 45. 135 Ibid., 21. 214 chapter five

In the words of the report, there was an “impassable gulf separating the Authorities and the Undergraduates.”136 Although they admitted that this gulf “should no doubt be filled up”,137 the Commissioners cautioned against the placing of undue emphasis on the tutor-pupil relationship to which the Oxford Movement had owed so much of its success. “[H]abits of intimacy and familiarity between elder and younger men, in order to exercise a really beneficial influence, require great judgment on the part of the seniors”, they wrote. “The characters of young men” at university “must be formed chiefly by intercourse with their contemporaries.”138 The Commissioners were equally clear on the need for a much broader curriculum than currently existed. As well as a genuine desire to encourage a greater focus on modern studies at Oxford, they saw the conservatism of the syllabus as partly responsible for the rise of Tractarianism. The stubborn attachment of the Hebdomadal Board and many senior members to the traditional classical and theological course of study had, they concluded, made it easier for the Oxford Movement to flourish at the university. Even with the changes introduced by the new statutes, the basis of the Laudian system remained as classical studies were compulsory for all students until the end of their time at Oxford. “The Laudian system received, in the year 1850”, they wrote, “the commendation of the present rulers of the University as ‘a system of study admirably arranged, at a time when not only the nature and faculties of the human mind were exactly what they are still, and must of course remain, but the principles of sound and enlarged culture were far from imperfectly understood.’ ”139 They criticized the framers of the 1800 and 1807 statutes for paving the way for the narrowing of the syllabus under Tractarianism. “The new system of Public Examinations then instituted was based on that of Laud”, they wrote, and defined classical studies in an unnecessarily narrow sense: “The Literae Humaniores were defined as comprehending the Greek and Latin language, with Logic, Rhetoric, and Moral Philosophy, no mention being made of Metaphysics or History.” As “the principal part of the Exam- inations seems to have been oral . . . success naturally depended rather on skill and accuracy in construing the Classics than on an acquaintance with Philosophy or History”.140

136 Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners, p. 26. 137 Ibid., 26. 138 Ibid., 26. 139 Ibid., 58. 140 Ibid., 60. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 215

Predictably the Commissioners praised the limited introduction of modern studies in the Noetic-inspired reforms of the late 1820s, in particular, “the important permission to illustrate ancient by modern authors” brought in by the 1830 Statute.141 Yet, they also used it as a powerful contrast to highlight the subsequent narrowing of the curriculum under Trac- tarianism. “With regard to the Examinations for Honours”, they wrote, “the course of reading seems to have become more and more limited.” In the years of Noetic prominence, “students were encouraged to study many works which have now almost entirely disappeared from the University course”.142 Among others they mentioned the works of Demosthenes and Cicero, who, other writers, including F.W. Newman, identified as being especially neglected under Tractarianism. Instead, there was an excessive focus on a small list of acceptable, non-threatening texts including Aristo- tle’s Ethics, Butler’s Analogy and Sermons as well as traditional school-boy authors such as Virgil and Horace.143 “[C]omplete acquaintance with a few books is hardly sufficient”, they wrote, “to compensate for the loss of the more free and comprehensive reading of the earlier period.” Despite the “much more advanced age” at which students now entered Oxford, “the University is for the majority of them a mere Grammar School from first to last”, they concluded.144 “A deep and independent study” of the history, “moral and metaphysical philosophy” of the ancient world was the only kind of classical studies fit for a university course.145 However, they sought to go further than this, calling for the final school of Literae Humaniores to be made optional rather than compulsory.146 In addition to a broader syllabus, the Commissioners also endorsed the calls of liberals for a greater number of examinations in the course of university study. Citing the 1848 memorial of the tutors to the Hebdo- madal Board, they warned against the “evil effects which are produced by the want of an adequate object for academical exertion in so large a portion of the younger Members of the University”.147 Like many other

141 Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners, p. 61. For an example of the contemporary view that Tractarians were opposed to modern studies, in particular, modern languages, see Ward and Heywood eds., Statutes Vol. II, p. 341. 142 Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners, p. 62. 143 Ibid., 62. For the comments by F.W. Newman, see above, p. 210. It is likely that commentators felt these particular writers were ignored as their works included discussion of controversial political topics such as the merits and demerits of democracy. 144 Ibid., 69. 145 Ibid., 62. 146 Ibid., 71. 147 Ibid., 64. 216 chapter five

commentators, the Commissioners felt that too much free time had played an important role in the rapid spread of Tractarian ideas among junior members. They praised the introduction of a ‘second’ or ‘intermediate’ examination at the end of the second year, particularly as it helped to confine less challenging parts of a subject like classics to the earlier part of the course. The structure of the new Literae Humaniores school designed by Jowett was praised for providing “for a free study of classical literature, for the restoration to their proper place of the great orators and poets of antiquity”.148 Along the same lines they revived the Noetic call for the introduction of a matriculation or entrance examination to raise the overall level of study. Citing the evidence of Whately, who had argued passionately for such a test in the late 1820s, they condemned the current state of education at Oxford by describing the university as a mere “School (and a very poor one)”.149 The idea that the reforms at mid-century should not be viewed as just another example of the reforming zeal of the British government, but also as a reaction to Tractarianism gains strength from the fact that Cam- bridge was dealt with very differently. In the report of the Oxford Com- missioners, it was held up, in many respects, as a model for Oxford to imitate. In particular, it was praised for its much more relaxed approach to subscription150 and greater willingness to open scholarships and fellowships to competition.151 Indeed, the Oxford Commissioners reported with admiration the absence of ‘founders’ kin’ at Cambridge.152 It was also believed to provide a far superior preparation for the learned professions, producing significantly more barristers and doctors than Oxford.153 As we have already seen, its successful scheme of allowing students to lodge pri- vately in the town was also cited as evidence that such a system might also work in Oxford to widen access to the university and create a more diverse student body.154 Even in smaller details such as the much greater readiness of libraries to lend books to readers155 and the stricter regulation

148 Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners, p. 68. 149 Ibid., 69. 150 Ibid., 19. 151 Ibid., 111, 162. Cf. Evidence, p. 201 where Herman Merivale commented that where fellowship elections did take place at Oxford they were far less challenging than at Cam- bridge. There they were “of a tougher kind, more absolutely requiring concentration of intellect and severe study.” 152 Ibid., 111. 153 Ibid., 18, 71. 154 Ibid., 53. 155 Ibid., 117. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 217 of relations between tradesmen and students, Cambridge was found to be distinctly superior.156 Cambridge also showed a greater willingness to cooperate with the government to reform its statutes.157 Indeed, although Commissions visited both universities (Cambridge some two years after Oxford in 1852), the two reports read very differently. At Oxford, the Com- missioners recommended what amounted to a revolution in the studies, teaching and government of the university; in Cambridge, it was far more a case of offering advice and improving arrangements and practices which were, by and large, already considered sound. These important differences between the two Commissions in tone and aim are often overlooked by historians who assume that the government was equally concerned about both universities. In this way, the importance of Tractarianism and its impact upon junior-senior relations in bringing about government intervention is frequently missed.

Reactions to the Commissioners’ Report

Reviewers of the Commissioners’ Report and Evidence in the liberal periodical press were almost unremittingly positive, seeing the Commissioners as allies in their campaign to modernize Oxford. Walter Bagehot, writing in the Prospective Review in July 1852, hoped that the Commissioners’ recommendations, especially the establishment of an effective professoriate, would finally ensure a mature system of education at Oxford. “The general design of the [college] Founders”, he wrote, had been to create “places for study” where “grown-up gentlemen and bearded scholars” would be the product, not “youth[s] and semi-men”.158 They had certainly not intended their institutions to promote the boyish skills of construing and composition favoured by Tractarian tutors. “There was no poetry”, he wrote, “no fine literature, no imaginative relaxation, in the scholarship of that time.” Instead, all types of learning were encouraged so long as they stimulated the students to “laborious vigour” and developed “the coarse understanding, the deductive reason”.159 The Oxford liberals were not slow to express their own satisfaction with the report. J.A. Froude, writing in the Westminster Review in October 1852,

156 Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners, (Evidence), p. 69. 157 Ibid., (Evidence), p. 123. 158 W. Bagehot, “Oxford”, The Prospective Review 8:31 ( July 1852), 360. 159 Ibid., 360–1. 218 chapter five rejoiced with Bagehot that Oxford would once again offer a proper university education when the Commissioners’ recommendations were made law. Like them, he blamed Tractarian control of the syllabus for the narrow and juvenile quality of education offered. With Bagehot, he argued that the colleges had been founded in an age of greater liberty from church control and that this had stimulated a much greater degree of independent inquiry. “There can be no doubt”, he wrote, “both from tradition and from the entire absence of any rule of life or discipline among the students, that the English Universities owe their origin to the same [anti-clerical] spirit which passed the Mortmain Act and the Premunire Statute.” In Froude’s mind, Tractarianism had rudely interrupted this glorious tradition of Eng- lish academic liberty. “It is not a little singular”, he mused, “that after two hundred years of constitutional government, and three hundred years of a reasonable and enlightened religion, we should be struggling to wrest out of the control of . . . ecclesiastics a liberty which grew freely and nobly under the imagined despotism of the Plantagenets”.160 Writing in the North British Review in November 1852, John Conington praised what he saw as the influence of his former headmaster, the Noetic, Thomas Arnold, upon the recommendations of the Commissioners.161 He was particularly pleased with the proposal that “idle and extravagant students” be summarily removed which he believed was based on Arnold’s famous statement that while “it was not necessary that Rugby should be a school of 300, or 100, or 50 boys, it was necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen”.162 In the proposal to revive the defunct professoriate, he likewise saw a perfect parallel with the special “instruction given to the sixth form at . . . Rugby” which Arnold had introduced. Just as he had started reading more challenging works such as Plato’s Republic with the sixth form, so the professors might be able to raise the overall level of university teaching as represented by tutorial instruction.163 The link with Arnold and Rugby was made with equal force by F.B. Zincke and Robert Vaughan in an article in The British Quarterly Review in November 1852. To the Oxford tutorial system, they wrote, “we are indebted for the strange result that Colleges confine their teaching

160 J.A. Froude, “The Oxford Commission”, The Westminster Review 58:114 (October 1852) 321. 161 [ J. Conington], “Oxford and the Royal Commission”, North British Review 18:35 (November 1852), 14. 162 Ibid., 9–10. 163 Ibid., 1–2. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 219 to the same subjects as schools, but they employ inferior teachers and inferior methods”.164 What Oxford needed to reform itself was not the “vanity of the recluse” which had characterized it since the early days of Tractarianism, but the “exemplary industry” and “plain good sense” of Thomas Arnold.165 Undergraduates reading Literae Humaniores should be made aware of a higher purpose to their studies. “Classical Studies, as pursued at Oxford, almost incapacitate the mind for any other pursuit”, they declared. “It happens, with but very few exceptions, that the student acquires not only no liking for them, but also a permanent dislike for serious studies of every kind.” They repeated the calls of the Commissioners and liberals like Jowett for a more graduated approach to classical studies where grammar and translation led in stages to the more challenging pursuits of philosophy and ancient history: We are persuaded that the effect would be very different if it were made manifest to the student that he was studying the classical languages as a ground for philosophical philology, or because the literature to which an acquaintance with them would introduce him contains the earliest, and perhaps the most interesting and important, chapters in the history of the fortunes and of the mental development of . . . the human family.166 The first response from a group within the university to the Commis- sioners’ report was the publication in January 1853 of the first of three pamphlets by the Oxford Tutors’ Association, a group claiming to represent the interests of the vast majority of those engaged in the teaching of the university. As they admitted at the beginning of the first pamphlet, their prime concern was “to carefully preserve and even to strengthen the principle of domestic and personal superintendence by recognised Tutors”.167 It was the dominance of the collegiate (and with it the tutorial) system, which, in the minds of many critics, had been largely responsible for the success of Tractarianism and its negative impact upon the quality of education. Even liberals like Conington could not deny the connection. “The theological history of the last twenty years”, he wrote, “is no more than a logical deduction from the operation of the collegiate system. It was no mere accident that connected the Tracts for the Times with the

164 [F.B. Zincke and R. Vaughan], “The Report of the Oxford University Commission”, The British Quarterly Review 32 (November 1852), 327. 165 Ibid., 294. 166 Ibid., 323. 167 Reports of the Oxford Tutors’ Association I: Recommendations Respecting the Exten- sion of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1853), p. 24. 220 chapter five

Oriel Common Room, and the persecution of Dr. Hampden with the Cor- pus Committee”.168 In contrast, the Tutors’ Association maintained that the tutorial system had merely been abused by Newman and his supporters and that, when properly used, it was in fact the only form of teaching which ensured an appropriately challenging university education. Their third pamphlet which appeared in November 1853 and discussed the Commissioners’ proposals for the restored professoriate made this point very clearly. After citing the view of the Commissioners that a revived system of professorial lectures would “be more favourable to the independence and self- education of the pupil than at present carried on by Tutors public or private”, they declared themselves “at a loss to imagine” how this might be the case. “On the part of the pupil”, they argued, professorial lectures would “be only so many authoritative statements which he is passively to imbibe and remember”.169 The tutorial system, by contrast, presented the student with a more challenging mental exercise forcing him to think for himself in the daily period of catechetical instruction. As Mark Pattison, now a leading figure in the Tutors’ Association, put it, “The Professorial and Tutorial methods represent respectively the education which con- sists in accomplishment and current information, and that which aims at disciplining the faculties and basing the thoughts on the permanent ideas proper to human reason”.170 The restoration of the professoriate in Oxford would also, they feared, lead to the subjection of the tutors as a class of teachers. Figuring themselves as so many “equal members of an intellectual republic”, blessed with “independence of thought”, the Tutors’ Association claimed that with the revival of professors all this would be lost, replaced by “the energetic rule of an official despotism”.171 Not only did the tutors feel that a reinvigorated professoriate would threaten their own position and system of instruction; they also feared for the future of classical studies which they felt professors were completely unsuited to teach. Following Copleston and other leading Noetics, they argued that a proper training in Oxford classics provided an unbeatable intellectual and moral education. In order to explain the peculiar value of classics when compared to the other subjects recommended by the

168 [Conington], “Oxford and the Royal Commission”, 37. 169 Reports of the Oxford Tutors’ Association III: Recommendations Respecting the Rela- tion of the Professorial and Tutorial Systems (Oxford, 1853), pp. 65, 67. 170 Ibid., 69. 171 Ibid., 77. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 221

Commissioners such as mathematics and natural science, the Association maintained that it was the only subject which was ‘subjectively’ as well as ‘objectively’ useful; in other words, that classical studies had value not only because they imparted factual knowledge, but also (and uniquely) because their highest disciplines of mental and moral philosophy acted as “a discipline of the mind”.172 A professor, they argued, was best suited to the teaching of subjects which entailed demonstration before large audiences such as natural science or which could be broken down into easily digestible principles. Classics which required detailed and accurate correction often with nuanced explanation was simply too complex to be taught effectively through what they considered an essentially ‘pas- sive’ medium of instruction. More than this, though, they felt that the very nature of professorial lectures would necessarily preclude sustained engagement with the works of classical authors. A professor’s thoughts, they wrote, “are necessarily cast in a modern mould . . . and that discipline and independence of mind acquired by contact with thinkers of other times and associations is in a great degree sacrificed”.173 The official response to the Commissioners’ recommendations came in December 1853 when the committee appointed by the Hebdomadal Board to analyse the Commission’s findings published their own Report and Evi- dence.174 Intensely conservative, the report was almost uniformly hostile to the Commissioners’ recommendations. With the heads now increasingly isolated, the majority of senior members favouring some form of parliamentary intervention, they were left to stand their ground with Pusey and his followers. The committee was thus dominated by Tractar- ians and by Pusey in particular. Officially he was merely the secretary and thus responsible for composing the report. However, his actual role was far more significant. Out of nearly five hundred pages of evidence from some twenty contributors, Pusey’s evidence occupies some one hundred and seventy three pages. This fact did not escape the attention either of Pusey himself or of those reading the report. When composing the main body and referring to his own evidence, he called himself in some places “Dr. Pusey” and in others “The Regius Professor of Hebrew” as if referring to two different people. The prominence of Tractarians on the committee and of Pusey, in particular, lost the heads much of what little public

172 Reports of the Oxford Tutors’ Association IIII, p. 88. 173 Ibid., 75. 174 Report and Evidence upon the Recommendations of Her Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiry into the State of the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1853). 222 chapter five sympathy remained to them. Pusey’s evidence arguably made more of an impact in the public arena than the report itself. H.H. Vaughan, Regius Professor of Modern History, took such offence at Pusey’s criticisms of professors that he wrote a pamphlet in March 1854 denouncing them.175 Vaughan’s pamphlet was in turn honoured with a review in Fraser’s Mag- azine which denounced the report of the Hebdomadal Board Committee as “so meagre and insubstantial that it needed no reply”. It was instead “the elaborate treatise of Dr. Pusey” appearing in the Evidence which demanded attention, constituting, as it did, a bold defence of Oxford under Tractarianism.176 In his evidence, Pusey was quick to turn around the accusations of puerility which the Commissioners had levelled against the education provided in Tractarian Oxford. Of their proposal to let students choose to study subjects like mathematics and natural science instead of Literae Humaniores at the end of the second year, he said it would “contract the mind by premature professional study, and . . . substitute an immature and undigested knowledge for solid discipline of mind”.177 The same point was made in more detail by Charles Marriott, another prominent Tractarian, second only, by this time, to Pusey in influence, in the evidence which he gave to the Committee. “If Oxford is still to send out educated men”, he argued, “she must not depart from [the current] system”. If a student neglects the studies more closely and fundamentally bearing on humanity, he will leave the University a far inferior man to what he might have become, though perhaps a greater proficient in some single line. Even in that line his attainments will be less solid and his judgement less mature than if he had exercised his mind in a course of general study.178 “General study” was exactly what they claimed Literae Humaniores offered. “No other study” explained Marriot, “can supply the place of an acquaintance with the religious history of man in the Holy Scriptures, with the . . . intellectual history of man in the history and literature of Greece, and with . . . the civil and political history of man in the history and literature of Rome.”179 While this sounds very similar to the case made for classical studies by the Tutors’ Association and even by liberals like Jowett, many readers would have questioned whether such a deep study of the

175 H.H. Vaughan, Oxford Reform and Oxford Professors (Oxford, 1854). 176 “Oxford Reform and Oxford Professors”, Fraser’s Magazine 49:291 (March 1854), 362. 177 Report and Evidence, p. 10. 178 Ibid., 307. 179 Ibid., 308. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 223

“intellectual”, “civil” and “political history of man” ever took place in the days of Tractarian dominance. However, when the report went on to oppose the Commissioners’ plans to revive the professoriate at Oxford, the familiar Tractarian emphasis on childlike obedience and the need for a strict system of discipline resur- faced. In comparison with college tutors, Pusey argued, professors could never exercise the degree of personal, intellectual and moral supervision of undergraduates which a university degree required. He accused the Commissioners of overestimating the maturity of the majority of students who came to Oxford at the age of eighteen or nineteen. “The proposal can only have arisen”, he wrote, “from exaggerated and utopian notions with respect to the energy, industry, and love of learning” which the average student displays. “It supposes that they will voluntarily do all in their power to prepare themselves for a co-operation with the Professor.”180 When students first enter the university, he argued, they are still boys and benefit from being treated as such. There was no question of “anticipating” the onset of manhood as Arnold had tried to do at Rugby. “The most effectual method of conveying knowledge” to undergraduates, wrote Pusey, “is compulsory attendance at [college] Lecture, previous preparation ascer- tained by question and answer, assiduous attempts to supply individual deficiency by elementary instruction, and, above all, personal advice and direction”; in other words, the tutorial system.181 If Oxford was to fulfil its chief role as a maker of “Christian men,”182 the last thing it needed was a system which promoted independent inquiry among students. Indeed, Pusey thought the chief weakness of the Commissioners’ recommendations to be the strong influence which he felt the example of continental, and, in particular, German, universities, had exercised over them. Pusey had himself spent over eighteen months at various universities in Germany and drew on his personal experience at length in the evidence he submitted to the Committee. It was to the influence of the German system, for example, that he attributed the Commissioners’ over- estimation of the maturity of undergraduates. “On the removal of the [German] student to the University”, he wrote, “he passes at once from boyhood to manhood; at once instead of discipline and control, he is left almost unfettered, even by moral guidance.”183 The result was far from

180 Report and Evidence, p. 254. 181 Ibid., 254. 182 Ibid., 172. 183 Ibid., 41. 224 chapter five

desirable. Instead of a successful transition to manhood, the German universities witnessed much higher levels of duelling, drinking, debauchery and general juvenile behaviour than Oxford with its well-developed system of intellectual and moral surveillance in the hands of the clergy.184 Nor, in Pusey’s mind, did the relaxed German system produce suitable teachers. Quoting from a seventeenth-century dialogue by Andrea, he referred to German professors who “ought themselves to be chastised with rods or whips” and who spent most of their time drinking in taverns with the young men they were charged to watch over.185 Not much had changed in the nineteenth century, he maintained. Convinced that a tendency “to look up to those older than oneself is implanted in human nature”, Pusey condemned the German system for its failure to harness what he saw as the foundation of any successful education: sustained and relevant “intercourse with one of matured mind”.186 For Pusey, the frequent opportunities for such intercourse constituted the peculiar advantage of the Oxford tutorial system. “The mind of the young man”, he wrote, “having been previously employed upon some solid task, has its thoughts corrected, expanded, developed, enlarged, by one of maturer mind and thought, who also brings to bear on the subject knowledge and reflection which the pupil cannot be presupposed to have.”187 It was, however, precisely this kind of intimate relationship and powerful personal influence over pupils which many reformers including the Commissioners considered most dangerous about the Tractarian system of education and sought, in part, to limit by their reform proposals. While Pusey and Marriott may have despised the professorial system of Germany primarily because it encouraged independent inquiry and a more distant relationship between teacher and taught, it was precisely this aspect which appealed to reformers keen to weaken the influence of Tractarian tutors and to encourage a student body more diverse in its academic interests and religious views. The complete immovability of the heads, combined with their new alliance with Pusey, Marriott and the Tractarians, convinced many in parliament who had previously been sceptical of the pressing need for legislation. For Russell, the most important issues were the opening of scholarships and fellowships to merit, the extension of university education to

184 Report and Evidence, p. 42. 185 Ibid., 46. 186 Ibid., 80. 187 Ibid., 1–2. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 225 a much greater proportion of the British population and the revival of an effective professoriate to balance the tutorial system. As well as rendering the university more efficient, such moves would also, he believed, break the back of Tractarianism and prevent the possibility of another theological faction dominating Oxford in the future. As Pusey’s report made clear, the heads were unwilling to compromise on any of these issues; and this, combined with persistent lobbying from the Oxford liberals outside parliament, and Gladstone within, led Russell to introduce a bill to make law the majority of the Commissioners’ recommendations on 17 March 1854. The influence of the liberals was once more considerable, with Jowett primarily responsible for drafting the bill. The form finally voted on contained a measure even more radical than those represented in the original draft, namely the abolition of all religious tests. Although recommended by the Commissioners, Russell had not felt confident enough to include it in the bill for fear that it might scupper the whole attempt at legislative reform. However, when James Heywood took the opportunity to add an amendment to this effect, the bill still made it comfortably through the Commons, providing striking evidence of the new enthusiasm for reform. Although it encountered some opposition in the Lords, hastily organized by Oxford’s Vice-Chancellor, Richard Lynch Cotton, it was eventually passed after Russell dropped the clauses relating to individual colleges. It is true that many in Oxford were angry about the removal of all religious tests—not simply the heads and Tractarians, whose opposition was predictable, but a considerable portion of the Tutors’ Associa- tion as well. Frederick Meyrick, for example, was a tutor at Trinity and, although a traditional High Churchman, he was deeply opposed to the pseudo-catholicism of the Tractarians. So aggrieved did he feel when he heard of the move by Heywood to abolish subscription that he wrote an impassioned letter to the MP for Oxford, Sir William Heathcote, in April 1854. He begged him to try to convince his fellow MPs that the faults of Tractarianism should not be seen as the faults of the university as a whole. Must “Oxford and her noble institutions . . . lose their historic connection with the Church of England”, he asked, simply because Newman and Pusey had abused their positions as college tutors?188 Others remained concerned about the effects of a restored professoriate. The spectre of different professors competing for attendance figures raised a real fear that they would begin tailoring their lectures to suit the perceived tastes of

188 F. Meyrick, Clerical Tenure of Fellowship. A Letter to Sir W. Heathcote M.P. for the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1854), pp. 10, 15. 226 chapter five their various students, thus undermining one of the main aims of reform, to restore a healthy and respectful relationship between junior and senior members. The University must “still claim the right to prescribe . . . such studies as she considers important to teach”, argued an anonymous pamphlet written soon after the bill was passed, “instead of suffering her pupils to dictate what they think proper to learn”.189 Others were worried about the potential effects of university extension upon the quality of education provided, particularly upon the standards achieved in the traditional field of the classics. In the middle of 1855, for example, a pamphlet appeared calling itself The Student’s Guide to the School of “Litterae Fictitiae”. A satirical imitation of the genuine student guide produced for the new Literae Humaniores examination after 1854, it described itself in its opening Latin paragraph as a new Final Hon- ours School introduced by the recent Oxford University Act designed for those students “naturally averse” (naturaliter aversentur) to the “dry writers” (aridis scriptoribus) of Mental and Moral Philosophy.190 In its con- stituent parts (Literature, Ethics, Logic, Rhetoric and Poetics etc.) it is an almost perfect replica of the genuine article. However, instead of classical texts, contemporary works of fiction, mostly by female authors, were set and possible examination questions included such gems as: “Evalu- ate the position assigned by the Pythagoreans to θηλυ (the feminine) in their co-ordinate system of goods” and “Are (1) the absence of a Middle Term, (2) the Identity of Premiss and Conclusion, essential or accidental characteristics of Feminine Syllogism”.191 If the point of the pamphlet— that the changes introduced by the recent Act of Parliament were likely to emasculate Oxford’s traditional Literae Humaniores syllabus by opening the university to students from diverse social backgrounds—was not clear enough from this alone, it went on to declare that it hoped to attract high numbers of female students with this new course in addition to the University’s existing male contingent (non viris tantum, sicut antea, sed feminis quoque).192 Many more, however, praised the Act as the saviour of the university. William Hamilton, for example, who had been the author of a series of

189 How Shall We Examine Dissenters? By An Examiner. Considerations Suggested by Clause XLIV of the Oxford University Act (Oxford, 1854), p. 19. 190 The Student’s Guide to the School of “Litterae Fictitiae” Commonly Called Novel- Literature (Oxford 1855) p. 4. 191 Ibid., 25, 28. 192 Ibid., 4. the tractarian threat and the royal commission of 1850 227 anti-Tractarian articles in the 1830s, stressed his support for the increase in competitive examination, which, as an educational practice, he declared, was utterly “incompatible with inertion”. Preparing for an examination, he explained, “constrains to accurate, minute and comprehensive study”. “It calls out self-activity, and requiring clear and distinct thinking, both in examiner and examinee” would go a long way to “counteract the prevail- ing pestilence of slovenly, desultory, effeminate reading” at Oxford and to make the university what it always should have been, a true “intellectual gymnasium”.193 Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, James Garbett, likewise praised the new spirit of inquiry which he believed the Act would introduce into the university. When he had first read the report of the Commissioners on which the Act was based, he had described it as “Her- culean” in “muscle and vigour”.194 Later, when the bill was being framed, he expressed his happiness that Oxford would finally have an active body of Professors who would “grapple manfully, and as original thinkers, with the peculiar . . . difficulties and problems of the day”.195 While the 1854 Act may have divided opinion, it cannot be doubted that it constituted an important turning point in the history of Oxford. It has usually been seen by historians as marking the beginning of a new era of government interest in the universities, and in education, more broadly, heralding the Commissions which looked into public schools, endowed schools and the state of elementary education later in the century. However, it also marks the end of an important phase in the history of Oxford, the phase in which the shifting dynamics between junior and senior members acted as a vital determinant of changes to the curriculum and examination system. Beginning with the proposals for reform at a college level in the years following the Jacobite riots in the first half of the eighteenth century, fear of junior rebellion against the university authorities was one of the most important factors driving the debate about the need for change. As we have seen, some of the most significant changes in the history of the university, such as the first uniform syllabus and the principle of competitive examination, were introduced, at least, in part, because of their potential to furnish the Hebdomadal Board and senior

193 W. Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform, Chiefly from The Edinburgh Review, Corrected, Vindicated, Enlarged in Notes and Appendices (London, 1853), pp. 678, 683. 194 J. Garbett, A Letter to the Rev. The Warden of Wadham (Oxford, 1853), p. 13. 195 Ibid., 18. 228 chapter five members, more generally, with a greater degree of control over the body of undergraduates and bachelors. Most immediately, the Act put an end to Tractarianism as a force within Oxford. After 1854, we must look outside the university for evidence of the continuing influence of the movement. Although Oxford was to witness ongoing tensions between junior and senior members in the second half of the nineteenth century, these were to be far less closely related to the question of university reform. Despite the continuing influence and popularity of Oxford Greats, the monopoly of classics and divinity had been broken and modern studies had been effectively established at the university. Indeed, there is a case to be made for saying that Oxford was not to witness generational conflict in general on a comparable scale again. The Oxford Movement had shown just how disastrous a breakdown of relations between these two groups could be with the reputation, and even the independence of the whole university put in jeopardy. With the removal of subscription and official sanction given to a variety of plans for university extension including the favoured scheme of ‘unattached students’, the undergraduate body did become more diverse in the decades following the Act of 1854. As the liberals had hoped, it arguably became more difficult for any single faction to influence, far less, dominate junior opinion. A reinvigorated professoriate and broader curriculum likewise ensured that the tutorial system, while retaining significant influence, was unable to exercise the kind of power it had done in the hands of Newman and the Tractarians. The addition of an intermediate examination at the end of the second year also ensured that students had considerably less time to spend on interests unconnected with their studies. While far from acting as a panacea for all the problems facing the university at mid-century, the Act did render Oxford more able to cope with the challenges arising from the new, older, and more independent type of student who emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the words of one recently-graduated bachelor, Edwin Hatch, writing in the North British Review some four years later in 1858, it marked a “new phase” in Oxford’s relationship with the nation, causing it to be associated in the public mind, for the first time, with “manhood”, rather than with “infancy or youth”.196

196 [E. Hatch], “Oxford Aristotelianism”, North British Review 29:58 (November 1858), 368. CONCLUSION

In the introduction, it was remarked that university reform at Oxford is a well-studied topic with little apparent need for another full-length study. Hopefully, by now it is clear that this book differs considerably from the majority of works which have looked at this issue, both recently and in the past. Most importantly, through an examination of the public discussion of possible changes to Oxford’s curriculum and examination system, what has been termed the ‘discourse of university reform’, it has attempted to provide a more complex interpretation of the various important changes introduced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Scholars working on the history of Oxford and Cambridge in recent years have shown relatively little interest in university reform as a problem requiring explanation. Indeed, with the growing popularity of the cultural historical approach and its particular interest in identity formation, the majority of studies have focused on the universities as a site for the development of ethnic and masculine identities. As Joseph Kett has remarked, there has been far less attention paid to accounting for change over time, particularly changes to the university curricula and examination systems.1 The few studies which have attempted to account for the introduction of competitive examination, a uniform syllabus, and a broad, modern curriculum at Oxford in this period, have usually treated such developments as the simple product of a desire for greater efficiency and improved educational standards, both on the part of the British government and internal reformers such as Benjamin Jowett and A.P. Stanley. While not denying that such motives had an important part to play in the decision of senior members and MPs to support a reforming agenda, this book has suggested that the factors determining the nature and course of university reform, in the case of Oxford, were considerably more com- plicated than such a top-down model suggests. Contrary to the impression given by the majority of historical treatments of reform at Oxford, senior members were not the only actors involved. It has been a major concern to show that junior members, in particular, the undergraduate

1 Mattingly, Jarausch, Craig, Kett and Turner, “Universities in Europe: North American Perspectives on European Historiography”, History of Education 37:3 (May 2008), 478. See above, p. 18. 230 conclusion body, possessed a significant amount of agency too; indeed, that one of the key relationships we have to focus on when attempting to explain the character of university reform in this period is that between junior and senior members. The changing dynamics of this often volatile relationship were important for virtually every significant development in the curriculum, teaching and examination system at Oxford between 1800 and 1854. As the first chapter showed, it was the significant participation of students in the Jacobite riots in the first half of the eighteenth century which prompted important reforms at a college level, designed to increase the degree of supervision exercised by tutors over undergraduates, above all, a more tightly controlled curriculum and more regular and exacting college examinations, or collections. By the time of the American and French Revolutions, which also saw considerable levels of student participation, particularly in the former case, a rising student age and tendency towards longer residence had combined to create a much more confident, independent-minded undergraduate body, whose potential for social and political radicalism was increasingly feared by senior members. In the wake of events in America and France, support grew among a wide cross-section of senior opinion for direct intervention at a university level, to enact some of the key reforms which had been seen to work successfully within their own colleges in response to the Jacobite riots. Hence the familiarity of many of the key provisions in the New Examination Statute of 1800. Indeed, it was suggested that through the introduction of a stricter syllabus and a system of regular, challenging and competitive examinations, the Hebdomadal Board sought to boost their authority and regain the control they were seen to have lost over junior members. Over the next two decades, the fears of senior members were to some extent realized with the emergence of the juniors as a separate interest group within the university for the first time. Visible partly in the unprecedented number of clubs and societies which were founded in this period, the key development, it has been argued, was a burgeoning culture of student journalism in which significant numbers of undergraduates and bachelors expressed their views about the behaviour of the college and university authorities and their resentment of measures they perceived as deliberately intended to restrict their freedoms and police their free time. As we saw, they sometimes invoked emotive comparisons with Cam- bridge, where they believed undergraduates were treated with greater respect by the authorities, enjoyed considerably more freedom and had access to a wider range of modern studies—mathematics and natural science in particular. Through a detailed study of these poems, pamphlets conclusion 231 and magazines, we saw the development of a much more coherent sense of student identity with a focus on shared interests and concerns and a common antipathy to tutors, fellows and senior members in general. While many of the publications contented themselves with setting out a programme of desired reforms or sniping at dons, others called explicitly for rebellion against the university authorities. Over time, the publications themselves became more sophisticated with a range of detailed, well- informed and carefully-researched student magazines being produced by the early 1820s. Such was the impact made by these publications and by the growing sense of student identity, more generally, that discussions about how best to deal with the new situation, whether to negotiate or to put in place further restrictive measures, became a central issue for senior members in the 1820s. It is little wonder that W.R. Ward identified university reform as “the burning domestic issue” of the decade.2 More changes to the curriculum and examination system were proposed to Convocation in these years than at any time since the introduction of the Examination Statute of 1800. Moreover, as we saw in the fourth chapter, many such proposals were closely related to the question of how best to control junior behaviour and to re-establish senior authority in the wake of extensive attacks not only at the hands of external critics, but also from growing numbers of Oxford’s own undergraduates and bachelors. It was, in large part, their claim to be able to curb junior ambitions which won so much support for Noetic reform ideas in the late 1820s and allowed them to dominate the committee set up by the Hebdomadal Board in 1829 to address the need for changes to the Examination Statute. It was likewise the belief that the Tractarians could reinstil a sense of obedience and respect for authority which allowed the emerging Oxford Movement to steal the initiative from the Noetics in the wake of the domestic crisis of 1828–32 as well as the unprecedented participation of students in the 1830 revolution in France. Despite urging what were, superficially at least, very different reform proposals, both the Noetics and the Tractarians benefitted substantially from their ability to convince the Hebdomadal Board and a majority of senior members that their ideas would help restore generational equilibrium within the university. The Tractarians, however, owed their success even more directly to the growing generational breach within the university. In chapters four and

2 Ward, Victorian Oxford, p. 56. 232 conclusion five, it was suggested that the Oxford Movement, at the height of its success in the mid 1830s, represented the high point of junior influence at Oxford. Although at first portraying themselves as the group capable of restraining the increasingly bold and erratic behaviour of junior members, Tractari- anism’s unrivalled strength within the university was primarily due to the enormous popularity it enjoyed within the junior body itself. A significant number of those in prominent positions in the movement including Newman had been actively involved in the subversive student journalism of the late 1810s and early 1820s, writing critical, and often deliberately provocative, pieces about senior members and the Hebdomadal Board. Within a few years, moreover, it became clear that the Tractarians were not going to prove the saviours of order and authority many had hoped they would. Although they succeeded in winning over vast numbers of undergraduates and bachelors, they soon began to use their influence to pursue a separate agenda, which came to be seen as increasingly subversive, rather than supportive, of the Hebdomadal Board. Tractarian tutors like Newman and Froude at Oriel used the tutorial system and the close contact it provided them with junior members to establish an alternative power base within the university. It was only after the very public attacks on Hampden that opposition to the movement and fears about the potential of Newman and his associates to foment rebellion among junior members grew to the point that concrete steps were taken to curb their influence over the student body. It was argued that the need to weaken Tractarianism as a force within the university, particularly following Newman’s secession in 1845 and the spate of undergraduate conversions which followed, was one of the prime factors determining the nature of the reforms introduced at mid-century, both internally by liberals like Jowett, and externally by the Oxford University Act of 1854. In particular, it was suggested that the removal of religious tests and plans for university extension, were driven not simply by an altruistic desire to widen access, but were also intended to help diversify the student body and make it harder for any one faction to dominate. It was likewise argued that moves to widen the curriculum may also have been at least partially designed to weaken Tractarian influence; many critics maintained that the conservative syllabus of classics and divinity had aided the rise of the Oxford Movement considerably by restricting the access of junior members to alternative ideas and points of view. The Act of 1854 certainly marked the end of Tractarianism as a force within the university. The role played by the newly confident undergraduate body and the fears they engendered in the minds of senior members were partially conclusion 233

recognized by Sheldon Rothblatt. He acknowledged the importance of such fears in directing the efforts of the framers of the 1800 Statute. How- ever, like many historians who have examined the effect of the French Revolution upon England, he remained convinced that any threat which senior members perceived from the undergraduate population was strictly limited in nature and was solved relatively quickly by the introduction of competitive examination. According to Rothblatt, the new examinations were so successful in occupying students’ time and in appealing to their growing ambition, that any fears of radical ideas spreading among junior members were quickly dissipated—at the latest by the end of the Napo- leonic wars.3 By refusing to countenance the possibility that the shifting dynamic between junior and senior members, visible from the late eighteenth century onwards, had any long-term role to play in determining the course of university reform, Rothblatt ultimately reinforced the persistent historiographical tendency to separate the experience of Britain from the rest of Europe and to see the British elite as exceptional in their ability to maintain their internal cohesion. While reforms at Cambridge seem to have been less directly connected to the changing dynamics of junior-senior relations and the greater readiness of undergraduates to challenge the university authorities, they acted as one of the most important factors driving changes at Oxford. It has been instructive to examine developments at Oxford against an alternative time-frame. Instead of concentrating on the nineteenth century or the Victorian era, which tends to emphasize the reforming and modernizing aspects of the changes introduced, a focus on the ‘Age of Revolu- tion’ allows additional, frequently neglected, motivations to emerge. In particular, it is hoped that an examination of the fractured, tense and often difficult relationships which existed within Oxford and played such an important role in determining the course of reform, will do much to challenge the notion that the British elite remained a strong and cohesive group while their European counterparts collapsed under the weight of internal rivalries and dissension. Contrary to the picture we frequently encounter of Oxford students in the historiography, they were just as engaged with contemporary social and political issues as their continental counterparts and were no less keen to critique the authorities or even to call for their overthrow if they saw the need.

3 See above, p. 7. 234 conclusion

If we follow the interpretation offered here of the changes introduced by the Oxford University Act of 1854, a strong parallel emerges with actions taken by a number of European governments, particularly Prus- sia and Austria, in the wake of heavy student involvement in the 1848 revolutions. In both cases, significant changes, including a broadening of the curriculum and a notable widening of access, were introduced with the primary aim of reducing dissatisfaction amongst the newly politicized and increasingly confident student population. It would be interesting to investigate the extent to which the reform of other predominantly elite institutions in the mid-Victorian period, in particular, the public schools, the civil service and the army, was driven by similar motivations. If conditions at Oxford were in any way typical then there is scope for revising considerably our current understanding of the coherence of the British elite and of the nation’s ability to avoid revolution. bibliography

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Index

Adams, James Eli 170 boys, boyhood 118–120, 130, 168, 177, 179, Adams, John 51 209 Aeschylus 54 Brasenose College 37, 48n121, 53, 59, 110, Prometheus Vinctus 57 160, 193, 196 ‘Age of Revolution’ 15, 233 Brent, Richard 100, 157, 162n118 Aldrich, Henry 127 British Critic 72, 134, 199 Logic 131, 144, 146, 156 British exceptionalism 23, 233 Alexander the Great 118 Brockliss, Laurence 3n11, 4, 14 American Revolution 8, 22, 48–63, 65, Brougham, Henry 153–154, 158 70–71, 75, 101, 154 Buckland, William 145n24, 158n93 Amhurst, Nicholas 32, 40 Burschenschaften 114 Anderson, R.D. 15n48 Burton, John 38, 47, 54, 57 Anglicanism 9, 28, 50, 57n154, 69, 71, 93, Butler, Edward 44 98, 100, 139, 148, 168, 187, 193 Butler, Joseph 162 See also The Church of England Analogy 162, 211, 215 Arran, Lord 32 Sermons 211, 215 Aristophanes 97n146 Aristotle 40n87, 76, 78–79, 83–84, 86–87, Cambridge, University of 7, 10–12, 32–35, 95–96, 118, 126–127, 129, 131, 146, 210–211 38–39, 43, 45–47, 49, 56, 60, 62, 69, 79, Nicomachean Ethics 68–69, 96, 215 85, 91–92, 94–95, 104–105, 113–114, 134, Organon 56 138, 162, 177, 188–191, 193–194, 205–206, Poetics 56 213, 216–217, 230, 233 Rhetoric 96 Cambridge Platonists 27 Arnold, Thomas 113, 140, 142, 145–147, 150, Elizabethan Statutes 25, 29 153, 161, 163, 166n140, 173–176, 182, 203, Senate House Examination 25, 30, 209, 211, 218–219, 223 114 Atheism, The Necessity of 110 Tripos 7, 23, 25, 29–30 Austen, James 74 Campbell, John 129n106, 132, 133 Austria 13, 233–234 Carlye, Thomas 211 Carter, George 36 Bacon, Francis 68, 86, 154 Catholicism 9, 136, 166, 171, 176, 187, Novum Organum 84, 87, 118 192–193, 199, 202, 210, 225 Bagehot, Walter 217–218 Catholic Emancipation 109, 139, Balliol College 37, 73, 75–76, 101, 129n106, 166–167, 169, 177 132, 163, 180n205, 193, 196 Cato 48, 51 Barrow, William 82 Chandler, John 182 Bayley, Edmund 177 Chapman, Joseph 73 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell 152 Charles I 45, 141 Bedford, Duke of 32, 38 Chartism 3 Bentham, Edward 41–43, 54–56 Childhood 9, 87, 119n65, 157 Bentley, Richard 29–30 Christie, W.D. 187, 202 Blackett, J.B. 204 Christ Church 8, 22, 33, 40–41, 46, 48–49, Blackie, J.S. 210–211 52–55, 57–58, 60, 72–76, 79, 85, 99, 101, Blacow, Richard 37 106, 110, 114, 116, 125, 130, 144, 197, 201 Boone, James Shergold 106, 116–136, 142 Church of England, The 24, 31, 45, 49, The Oxford Spy 115–138, 106–142 177–178, 192, 199, 202, 205, 210 Bowden, John 126–128, 131, 134, 136 See also Anglicanism 252 index

Churton, Edward 182, 191 divinity 11, 17n56, 22, 43–7, 56–57, 60, 62, Churton, Ralph 72 65, 68–69, 72, 78–79, 81, 98, 102–103, 111, Churton, T.T. 193 135–136, 181, 191, 194, 206, 228, 232 civil service 3, 234 Dolben, Sir John 37 classical studies passim Drummond, Henry Home 83, 87, 90 See also Greek, Latin, Literae Humaniores close fellowships 1 Eden, Charles Page 180n205 Cicero 40n87, 47–48, 52, 58, 72, 96, 116, Edinburgh Review 66, 84–88, 90, 93–94, 130, 133, 210, 215 97, 100 De Officiis 55, 58n162 Eldon, Lord 109–110 De Re Publica 69 Elmsley, Peter 131 In Catilinam 55, 82 Enlightenment, The 11, 22, 27, 31, 32, 68 Clare College 27, 29–30 Euclid 79, 81, 144, 146–147, 150, 164 Clarke, George 36 Euripides 54 Clarke, M.L. 41, 43n97, 55n147 Hippolytus 57 Clough, A.H. 203n79 Medea 57 Cole, John 99 Eveleigh, John 76, 78, 99, 101, 109 Cole, William 24 Everett, Edward 195 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 146, 151, 156 Exeter College 196n38, 48n119, 48n121, competitive examination 4, 7, 8, 11–12, 180n205 16–17, 21, 23, 25–27, 53–54, 60, 62–65, 75, 78, 102, 105, 137, 141, 147, 169, 227, factory reform 2 229–230, 233 Faussett, Geoffrey 179,191 composition 42, 58, 86, 122, 203, 210, 217 Feuer, Lewis 8, 13–14, 18 conflict theory 18 Follen, Karl 14 Congreve, Richard 203–204 Fox, Charles James 72 Conington, John 203n79, 218–219 France 4, 13, 17, 31, 76, 82, 102, 126 Construing 42, 58, 84, 210, 214, 217 French Revolution 1789 63, 65, 66–75, Cooper, Myles 50 82, 102, 230 Copleston, Edward 66, 76, 93–100, 102, French Revolution 1830 9, 167, 169, 104, 106–107, 111, 117, 119–121, 125, 127, 130, 207, 231 142–143, 145–147, 150–162, 166, 169–170, franchise reform 2 184, 204, 220 The Reform Act 1832 139 Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 26 Franklin, Benjamin 30, 51 Corpus Christi College, Oxford 38, Froude, J.A. 217–218 48n121, 54, 83 Froude, Richard Hurrell 170–171, 189, Corsi, Pietro 166 191–192, 232 Cotes, Roger 28 Cotton, Richard Lynch 225 Garbett, James 227 Cox, George 195 Gardiner, Bernard 33 curriculum reform passim Gascoigne, John 11, 24–27, 29, 39n79 gender 17–18 Davie, Joseph 53 manliness 17n58, 27, 52, 93–95, 97, Davison, John 100, 130, 132 99, 101, 104, 106–107, 116, 118, 122, 131, Dawes, James 37 146–147, 152, 158n89, 203, 210–211 Dean(e), John 167 gentleman commoners 67 ‘defensive modernization’ 188 geography 43 Deism 11, 43–45, 49 George I 33, 35, 37, 39, 83 Demosthenes 54, 72, 96, 130, 210, 215 George II 35 Descartes, René 27 George III 48 Deslandes, Paul 10, 17, 104n2 Germany 4, 13, 102, 114–115, 134, 152, Dibdin, T.F. 73–74 173–174, 176, 178n195, 181, 208n102, disputations 25, 29, 43, 54n142, 107 223–224 dissenters 34–35, 40, 48–63, 65, 68–69, Prussia 233 71, 72n34, 84, 174–175, 180, 205 Gevers, Lieve 14 index 253

Gibbon, Edward 40, 53, 117 Homer 118, 158n91 Gilbert, A.T. 160, 192, 201 Illiad 41 Gillis, John R. 13–14, 18, 66 Horace 58, 96, 215 Gladstone, William Ewert 192, 225 Horne, George 46, 49–50, 52, 54, 57, Glorious Revolution, The 28, 30–31 70–72 Golightly, C.P. 194, 201 Hoskin, Keith 4 Gordon Riots, The 51 Huber, V.A. 209 Gower, Lord 38 Huddesford, George 47–48 Grant, Elizabeth 108 Hurdis, James 53, 55, 57–58 Gray, Thomas 25 Hutchinson, John 44–45 Greats 7, 163, 228 Hutchinsonianism 44–47, 49–50, 65, Greek 40n87, 54–55, 58, 71, 78, 80, 70–72 84–88, 97n146, 115, 122, 158n92, 162, 164, The Scholar Armed Against the Errors 209–210, 214 of the Time 72 See also classical studies, Latin, Literae Humaniores identity formation 9, 13, 18, 105, 116, 126, Greek New Testament 43, 45, 79 134–135, 137, 141, 197, 229, 231 Green, John 26 Interregnum, The 27 Green, V.H.H. 59 Grenville, Lord 99, 109–110, 155, 166 Jackson, Cyril 73–74, 76, 99, 101, 109n25, Griffith, James 108 125 Grotius, Hugo 57 Jacobinism 7–9, 21, 32, 64, 68, 70, 77, 207 Gwatkin, Richard 114 Jacobitism 21, 28, 32, 35–36, 38, 47–48 rioting at Oxford 8, 11n30, 21–22, Hackney Phalanx, The 134 32–33, 52, 59, 63, 65, 71, 137, 198, 227, Hall, Charles Henry 110 230 Hall, George William 140, 144 James II 31 Hamilton, William 173–174, 176–178, 226 James III 37 Hampden, Renn Dickson 135, 142, 156, Jebb, John 30–31 161–162, 164, 175–177, 181–183, 185–187, Jelf, William Edward 196n39, 197 189–191, 194, 198, 204, 212n120, 220, 232 Jelf, Richard William 197 Hanover, House of 21, 22 Jesus College 196n38, 31n43 Hardwicke, Lord 38 Jeune, Francis 207–208, 211 Hare, Augustus 113, 140, 142–144, 151n48, Johnson, Samuel 49 156, 160, 163, 166, 177–181, 189 Jones, William 51–52, 75 Harrison, Sedgwick 37 Jones, William (of Nayland) 70–72 Hatch, Edwin 228 Jowett, Benjamin 1, 73, 188, 202–203, Hawkins, Edward 136, 143–145, 151n48, 206–208, 211, 213, 216, 219, 222, 225, 229, 156, 160, 163, 166, 177–181, 189 232 Hay, Robert William 114–115 Julius Caesar 52, 54, 58 Hearne, Thomas 36 Commentaries 55, 58n160 Heathcote, Sir William 225 Juvenal 97n146 Herbert, Henry John (3rd Earl of Carnarvon) 124–125, 129, 133 Karlsbad Decrees 114–115 Hermogenes 40n87 Keble, John 170, 180, 191 Herodotus 43, 54, 96 Kennicott, Benjamin 46 Hertford College 24, 38n75, 41 Kett, Joseph 18–19, 229 Heywood, James 187, 195, 211–212, 225 King, William 36–38, 47–48 high church 28, 44, 72, 134, 191, 225 King’s College, New York 50 Hilton, Boyd 2 Knight, Richard Payne 85, 88 Hinds, Samuel 155, 157, 188, 211 Knox, Vicesimus 58, 61, 67, 70–71, 77, 107, Hodson, Frodsham 110 124n85 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson 110–111, 115 Holland, Lord 177 Lake, W.C. 203n79, 211 ‘Holy Alliance’ 28 Lambert, James 26 254 index

Landon, Whittington 110 Meadowcourt, Richard 36 Landor, Walter Savage 75 Medwin, Thomas 110 Langford, Paul 35 Meredith, Sir William 49 latitudinarianism 27–31, 45, 56, 62 Merivale, Herman 171, 216n151 Latin 25 42, 47, 51, 54–55, 58, 78, 80, Merton College 36, 48n121 84–86, 88, 92, 97n146, 116, 122, 130, 132, Methodism 48 159, 162, 209, 210, 214, 226 Meyrick, Frederick 225 See also classical studies, Greek, Literae Mill, John Stuart 156n78 Humaniores Miller, Edmond 35 Laughton, Richard 29 Milton, John 133 Leigh, Theophilus 37 modern history 10, 61, 163, 188, 206–208, Letter of the Four Tutors 193, 208 222 Lewis, David 196n38 Moore, John 27 liberal education 17, 58, 61, 67, 131, 149, moral philosophy 43, 78, 151, 162, 171, 214, 155 221, 226 Lincoln College 67, 83 More, Henry 27 Lingen, R.R.W. 203 Morpeth, Viscount 192 Literae Humaniores 130, 150n47, 161, Morris, James Brande 196 206–207, 214–216, 219, 222, 226 Mozley, Thomas 170–171 See also classical studies, Greek, Latin Littlemore 172 Napleton, John 53, 59–61, 70–71, 77–78, Livy 54–55, 96 107 Locke, John 31–32, 49, 51, 68 Napoleonic Wars 3, 14–15, 114, 134, 233 Essay on Human Understanding 31–32 natural sciences 10, 28, 61, 95, 144, logic 56, 60, 78–79, 81–84, 95, 110, 121, 125, 205–207, 221–222, 230 127, 131–132, 144, 146, 150, 156–158, 161, New College 85, 113, 142, 155n74, 160n105, 163–164, 207, 214, 226 175, 189 London University 153, 155, 159 Newcastle, Duke of 38 low church 11, 22, 28, 189 Newman, Francis William 209, 215 Lucretius 97n146 Newman, John Henry 9, 106, 126–128, Lysias 55 131, 134–136, 138, 140, 151n48, 157, 160, 166–228, 232 Magdalen College 40, 46, 48n121, 53, 55, Newton, Isaac 11, 27–31, 44–47, 69, 87, 91 57–58, 60, 70 Principia 26, 28–29 Magdalene College, Cambridge 31n43 Newton, Richard 24, 38n75, 41 Marriott, Charles 180, 222, 224 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg 173n173, 176 Marshall, Frederick Earnshaw 196 Nimmo, D.B. 4 Marshall, John 196 Nockles, P.B. 16, 139, 175n179, 177, 183, Martin, George 142n10 188–189 Mason, William 47 Noetics 9, 93, 100, 139–186, 188–190, mathematics 11, 25–30, 45, 56, 67, 69, 203–205, 207, 209, 211, 215–216, 220, 231 71, 79, 84, 91, 95, 101, 104–105, 113–115, See also Oriel College 124, 138, 144, 148, 150n47, 163–165, 168, Non-conformism 1, 11, 30, 45, 48, 91 172–173, 188, 191, 205n92, 221–222, 230 North, Lord 49, 67 matriculation, age of 87, 112, 134, 184 Matthew, Colin 16, 139, 166, 168, 180 O’Connell, Daniel 167 maturity 4, 9, 12, 17n58, 22, 61, 69, 83–84, Oakeley, Frederick 180n205 87–88, 94, 100, 102, 104, 106, 119–122, Oriel College 9, 46, 41, 55, 76, 78, 93, 124–125, 129–131, 143, 146, 153, 172, 99–101, 128, 130, 132, 135–136, 142–143, 151, 175–176, 178–180, 205, 207, 211, 217, 156–157, 160, 164, 170–171, 174, 180, 185, 222–224 189, 219, 232 Maurice, F.D. 179 See also Noetics Maurice, Peter 189 Ormonde, Duke of 32 Mazzini, Giuseppe 14 ‘Oxbridge’ 3n11, 10, 17 index 255

Oxford liberals 28, 49, 93, 100, 139, 151, Peterhouse, Cambridge 30 155n74, 160n103, 167–169, 171, 175, 177, Phipps, Sir Constantine 32 184–186, 188, 202–208, 211, 213, 215, 217, Pindar 97n146, 172 219, 222, 225, 228, 232 Pitt, William (The Younger) 72, 76–77, Oxford Police 197, 201 90 Oxford Tutors’ Association 219–222, 225 Plato 211, 218 Oxford, University of Playfair, John 84 bachelors 4–6, 8, 26, 35, 47, 60, 87, 105, Polybius 51, 129 128–129, 132, 138–141, 148, 158–159, 175, political philosophy 61 187, 197, 200, 202n78, 228, 230–232 Pope, Alexander 118n61 Church of St. Mary, The Virgin 172, 189 Porson, Richard 31 Convocation 77, 83, 85, 87–88, 93, 102, Porteus, Beilby 28 108, 111, 129, 144–145, 148–150, 160–161, Portland, Duke of 76 163, 166–168, 178, 181–182, 184–185, Powell, Baden 142, 155–156, 161, 163, 165, 193–196, 199–200, 212, 231 167–168, 172, 175n179, 188, 190, 192, 205, Hebdomadal Board 1, 32, 44, 64, 75, 210–211 79–80, 83, 89–90, 92–93, 101–102, ‘predictable advance’ model 4, 17 106–108, 111, 129, 140, 144, 147–148, 150, Price, Bonamy 175n179, 190–191 155, 160–161, 164, 177, 181, 184, 187–188, Prideaux, Humphrey 33, 59 193–194, 199–200, 202, 206, 208, Priestley, Joseph 30, 51, 68–70, 93 214–215, 221–222, 227, 230–232 public schools 3, 24, 57, 86, 227, 234 junior members passim Eton College 57–58, 211 junior-senior relations passim Pusey, Edward Bouverie 135, 176, 178–181, Masters of Art (MAs) 32, 37, 44, 60, 187, 189, 191–200, 202, 209–210, 212, 64, 75 221–225 proctors 29, 37, 59–60, 67, 77, 111, 118, 126, 129, 132, 177,196–197 Queen Anne 36 professors 26–28, 37, 43, 45, 50, 93, 95, Queen’s College, The 44, 48n121, 50, 107, 111, 114–115, 135, 155, 173, 177, 58n162, 82, 158, 189 181–182, 185, 190–191, 193–194, Quintilian 40n87, 97 206–208, 210, 213, 217–218, 220–223 De Institutione Oratoria 56 Responsions 80, 81, 96 senior members passim Radcliffe Camera 38 undergraduates passim Radnor, Earl of 174, 177, 181, 187, 189–190 Vice-Chancellor passim Rannie, D.W. 93 Oxford University Act 1854 2, 187–188, religious tests 226, 232–233 Repeal of the Test Acts 139 Oxford University Commission (1850) 1, Thirty-Nine Articles 30, 44–45, 49, 57, 6, 8–10, 162, 186 60, 79, 93, 98, 135, 160n105, 174–175, Oxford University Statutes (1851) 212 178, 193, 202, 213 revolutions of 1848 13, 208, 233–234 Palmer, Roundell 180, 200 Robson, David W. 52 Palmer, William 198–199 Romanticism 135 Parker, Thomas 34 Rothblatt, Sheldon 7, 9, 17, 23, 62, 64–65, Parnell, Paul 196 93 Parr, Samuel 81, 159 Round, J.T. 163 Parsons, John 73, 76, 89, 101, 109 Rugby School 175n179, 203, 209–211, 218, Patten, Thomas 49 223 Pattison, Mark 220 Russell, Lord John 188, 211, 224–225 Peacock, George 114, 138 Pearson, John 57 Sallust 54–55, 82, 96 Peel, Sir Robert 160n103, 166, 171 Bellum Catilinae 55, 82 Pembroke College 48n121, 144n23, 152, Sand, Karl Ludwig 114 159, 207–208 Sandford, Daniel K. 130–132, 142–144,146 256 index sanitary reform 2 Cambridge Union Society 134 Scientific Revolution 22, 27 Oxford Union Society 134, 141 Scottish universities 16, 40, 154, 210 student subculture 13, 17–18, 193, 198–199 Selden, John 51 Symons, Benjamin 199–200, 212 Seneca 52 Senior, Nassau 155, 157, 162n118, 205 Tacitus 52, 55, 97, 129 Sewell, William 170, 176, 180, 190–192, 197 Annals 55 Sheldonian Theatre 110,195, 197, 200 Tait, A.C. 193, 211 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 110–111, 115, 152 Temple, Frederick 203n79 Sherlock, Thomas 38 Tenison, Thomas 28–29, 31n47 Short, Thomas Vowler 164n129, 144–145 Thucydides 43, 54–55, 97–98, 210 Shuttleworth, Philip Nicholas 155n74, Tillotson, John 28–29 160n105, 175, 177 Toland, John 34–35 Slee, Peter 16 Tories 32 Smith, Goldwin 188, 204, 212 Townsend, W.C. 158–159 Smith, Joseph 44 Townshend, Lord 33, 59 Smith, Robert 28 Tractarianism 9, 106, 134–228 Smith, Sydney 85–88, 90, 130–131, 184 Tracts for the Times 134, 194, 198, 219 Sophocles 54, 172 Tract 90 193–194, 204, 208, 212 Southey, Robert 75 Trinity College, Cambridge 29–30 Spencer, Charles (Earl of Sunderland) 33 Trinity College, Oxford 44, 47, 53–55, Spencer, Lord Henry 72 57–58, 67n8, 73, 75, 78, 126, 128, 180, 225 St. Edmund Hall 48–49 Tuckwell, William 196–197 St. John’s College 40, 61, 74, 135, 193, 196, 201 Undergraduate, The 126–129 St. Mary Hall 36–37, 48n119, 167 Unitarians 30–31, 174, 195–196, 212 Stanhope, James 34 University College 108, 111 Stanley, A.P. 188, 203–204, 206, 208, university reform, discourse of 5–6, 138, 211–213, 229 229 Statutes 196, 212, 217, 231 New Examination Statute 1800 6–9, 11, van Helmont, Jan Baptist 27 16–17, 21–22, 62, 64–104, 107, 109n25 von Kotzebue, August 114 125, 128, 135, 169, 184, 214, 230–231 Varro 51 Examination Statute 1807 8–9, 106, Vaughan, Henry Halford 1, 208, 222 108, 111, 113, 117, 122, 125–126, 128, 135, Vaughan, Robert 218 214 Vaughan, Thomas 173–174 Examination Statute 1808 128 Virgil 58, 96, 215 Examination Statute 1825 140–150, 153, Aeneid 41 155, 157, 160–161 Vos, Louis 14 Examination Statute 1830 151–160, 166, 172, 175, 185, 205n92, 215 Walpole, Horace 39 Examination Statute 1849/1850 207, 214 Ward, Edward 85, 90–91, 106, 125 Laudian Statutes 40, 43, 59, 61 Ward, W.G. 187, 200, 201, 212 Stevens, Nicholas 44 Ward, W.R. 79, 164, 166, 231 Stevens, William 72n34 Waring, Edward 28 Stewart, Dugald 162 Warton, Thomas 47–48 Stocker, Charles William 182n219, 129, 135 Warwick, Andrew 11, 104–105, 113–114 Stone, Lawrence 22–23 Washington, George 75 Strabo 85, 88 Watson, George 45 Stray, Christopher 162 Wellington, Duke of 190, 192, 199 Stuart, House of 32–33 Wesley, Charles 48 student magazines 104–138 Wesley, John 48 student clubs and societies 72–73, 93, Whately, Richard 142, 145n24, 155–158, 105, 113, 134, 137, 141, 230 160–164, 166, 169, 177, 182, 189, 204, 216 index 257

Whewell, William 114n46 Wills, John 73–74, 93 Whigs 1–2, 11, 15n49, 22, 28, 32–37, 45, Wilson, H.B. 193, 208 47–48, 51, 61–62, 70, 72, 76, 81, 109, 160 Wood, G.W. 174–175, 177 Whig Interpretation of History 2, Woodgate, H.A. 192 15n49, 62, 155n74 Worcestor College 110 Whiston, William 29, 43n98 Wynter, Philip 193, 196 White, James 159 White, Joseph Blanco 155–157 Xenophon 43, 54–55, 96, 98 Whitmore, John 37 Anabasis 55 Wilberforce, H.W. 180–181, 185 Cyropaedia 55 Wilberforce, Samuel 141 Memorabilia 55 Wilberforce, R.I. 168, 170–171, 189 Williams, Isaac 193 Zincke, F.B. 218