A Projected Cromwellian Foundation at Oxford and the ‘True Reformed Protestant ‘ Interest, c.1657-8

Abstract

Abstract The number of Oxford colleges founded in the three centuries following the break from Rome is so small as to make even an unsuccessful attempt to erect a new college in the seventeenth century a development of considerable historical interest. The attempt is all the more intriguing, given that it occurred during the contradictory years of the Cromwellian Interregnum: a period which incongruously witnessed repeated calls for the abolition of university education from the radical sectaries, and a determined move to found a third national university at Durham, notwithstanding the vociferous opposition of the Oxford and Cambridge academics. With Christ Church (1525) being more Cardinal Wolsey ‘s creation than Henry VIII ‘s, and Trinity (1555) and St. John ‘s (1557) being Marian foundations, only five colleges can truly be said to have been Protestant foundations before the nineteenth century-Jesus (1571), Wadham (1610), Pembroke (1624), Worcester (1714), and Hertford (1740), and several of them were grafted onto the relics of earlier, medieval halls. The new Oxford college was to be raised on the basis of the ailing St Mary Hall, an institution which by the late 1650s was on the verge of collapse. The evidence for the existence of such a project depends on a unique seventeenth-century document found in British Library, MS Additional 32,093, fos 399-400v: an undated item which once belonged to the Nonjuring antiquary, George Harbin,4 the learned librarian and honorary chaplain of Thomas Thynne, first Viscount Weymouth, and a former University Burgess, at Longleat House, in Wiltshire. The document is an incomplete draft of what was obviously intended to be, in its final form, a letters patent suitable for Oliver Cromwell to sign as Lord Protector.