The name is absent

Middle Ages and Renaissance 241
provided with professorial chairs. Henry VIII founded two
splendid colleges, Trinity and Christ Church, out of the
spoils of the monasteries, and in each University established
five Regius Professorships of Greek, Hebrew, Divinity,
Medicine, and Civil Law, whose incumbents were appointed
and salaried by the Crown. The Tudor and Stuart monarchs
constantly interfered in university government, often dic-
tating the choice of heads of colleges, and sometimes even of
college fellows. Lecturers who said things ungrateful to
royal ears were promptly silenced or dismissed; an historian
who gave a lecture “upon the Excesses of Tarquinius Su-
perbus his infringing the Liberties of the People” was
thought to be reflecting on the Crown and was forbidden to
continue his course. The Crown regarded it a first duty of
the English universities to defend whatever religious com-
promise the Church of England happened to represent at a
given moment ; and it was in part their disgust with this situa-
tion that led so many university-trained Puritans to emigrate
to New England. But by that time, 1630, England had
been Protestant a full century; and the tradition of complete
university autonomy had been lost : it was assumed that all
institutions of learning would be regulated and supervised by
the State, and our colonial colleges fell into the same pattern.

In time the English universities recovered their ancient
freedom from State interference, and our colonial colleges
gradually emancipated themselves from the same influence.
So in the long run, the simultaneous adoption of the Renais-
sance and Reformation at Oxford and Cambridge was more
effective on American higher education than the political in-
fluence of the Reformation. The twin humanist ideals of
classical scholarship and a gentleman’s education were
brought to England by Erasmus early in the sixteenth cen-
tury, and had made considerable progress before Henry VIII

<<   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   >>

More intriguing information