‘Christ’s College and the Latitude-Men’ Revisited: A Seminary of Heretics?

Abstract

This chapter examines the notorious quarrel between Ralph Widdrington and Ralph Cudworth concerning the mastership of Christ's College. This prosopographical study of the fellowship at Christ's College between 1644 and 1669 yields two conclusions. First, Widdrington's opposition required that Cudworth be ever vigilant as master of the college, especially during the Restoration of the Monarchy. Perhaps without Widdrington's sour and vindictive temper and personal ambition there would have been less urgency in Henry More's and Cudworth's formation and consolidation of a congenial fellowship, but it was necessary to create an environment in which the Platonist philosophers and their pupils could work freely. More and Cudworth, as close friends and philosophical allies, formed the nucleus of a community with a particular intellectual character. This leads to the second and much more important conclusion: all of that effort was necessary because there was definitely something going on intellectually in the college which had to be defended. Widdrington and his high church allies took umbrage at what the ‘latitude-men’ were thinking, saying, and writing at the ‘seminary of Heretics’. The chapter then looks at the circle of Christian Platonists in Cambridge whose collective thinking would eventually become known as ‘Cambridge Platonism’.